A bleeding good and gritty tale
Bleed for This is a gritty, pungently Rhode Island working class-set boxing drama that connects with most of its punches. Based on the colourful life of pugnacious fighter Vinny Pazienza, a champion in three different weight categories who dramatically defied doctors and the odds when he returned to the ring after breaking his neck in a car accident, this welcome return by Boiler Room writer-director Ben Younger can’t help but hit some familiar boxing picture notes but still rates as a vibrant addition to the genre.
Not exactly a household name even though he defeated Roberto Duran twice and held championship belts in three different weight categories, Vinny Pazienza (later Vinny Paz) was nonetheless a classic boxing world character, a Guido-type from a wiseguy Providence hood who rose from the local scene to “be somebody”.
The first we see of him, however, he’s at his worst, barely able to make weight for a lightweight championship bout against Roger Mayweather, gambling and carousing with his good-time girlfriend at a casino the night before the fight and getting a whupping in the ring as a consequence.
It’s so bad that his trainer Lou Duva (Ted Levine, wonderfully sleazy) tells Vinny that he should hang up his gloves, and Younger injects some great low humour into a scene in which the fighter’s goodfellatype handlers sit around on children’s furniture at one of their homes, discussing the kid’s future.
But Vinny’s determined to carry on and engages an alcoholic trainer that Mike Tyson has recently fired, Kevin Rooney (a bald and bellied Aaron Eckhart, as you’ve never seen him before). Observing that they’re “both out to pasture”, Rooney suggests that the kid move up in weight class, even by two categories, to 154 pounds. The ploy works, Vinny starts winning again and everything’s looking up until a car he’s riding in is rammed by another vehicle on a highway.
Lucky to be alive, Vinny begins a long recuperation that involves the installation of a “halo” around his head, a metal brace featuring screws that bore down into his skull; this will at least guarantee that he’ll walk again. At the film’s halfway point, Rooney lays it out for his charge: “It’s over. You gotta let it go.” If anything, this motivates the wild kid to prove the older man wrong and Vinny, at 165 pounds, returns to Las Vegas for a shot at Duran’s super-middleweight championship belt.
With executive producer Martin Scorsese looking over his shoulder, Younger injects the action with as much visual and performance juice as he can muster, stirring interest in a crude, emotionally imprudent and severely flawed man, and serving up a thick slice of specific ethnic family ways in the bargain – in this case working-class Catholics.
One of the film’s disarming surprises is hearing these heavily accented voices coming out of actors who have never been associated with such characters, particularly Eckhart and Ciaran Hinds, the latter playing Vinny’s imposing, unpredictable father. Eckhart digs down to find dramatic potential he’s never mined before and thereby socking over his portrayal of a morally fluctuating guy with many foibles who still provides Vinny with the tactical guidance he needs to floor his opponents.
The imposing Hinds has no trouble at first establishing the old man’s domineering pater familias profile but continues to add shadings of intuition and understanding in regard to his son.
Katey Sagal cuts a weird figure as a compulsively religious mother so rattled by her son’s occupation that she remains in her prayer room while everyone else watches Vinny’s bouts on the tube.
Teller cuts a convincing boxer’s figure in the many scenes of training and combat. Whether there are more levels to this guy, however, is uncertain.
All production values contribute to soaking the viewer in a convincingly moldy, sweaty, tawdry environment. Dramatically, the story reshapes events and ignores referencing many other bouts, including what happened after the film’s climax. –