REALLY GRIPPIN’
Stephen Merchant’s stirring tale of a Brit girl
WRESTLING matches may be fixed, but the lovable rogues in Stephen Merchant’s rousing comedy drama feel refreshingly real.
Fighting With My Family tells the rags-to-riches story of Saraya “Paige” Bevis, a Norwich goth who became the unlikely star of the primped and perma-tanned world of US wrestling.
Rising star Florence Pugh body slams the role of the plucky outsider, holding us in a vice-like grip from her opening scene.
She proved what a great actress she is as the femme fatale in her debut movie Lady Macbeth.
Here she shows how versatile she is with an athletic turn that’s packed with heart and humour.
The title, from a 2012 Channel 4 documentary on the real Bevis family, isn’t all about the pun. Early on we see Saraya being choked by Zak, her older brother. Their parents, ex-con Ricky and his adoring wife Julia (Nick Frost and Lena Heady), are appalled.
They tell the boy he isn’t holding her tightly enough. And then they sit back to see if the girl can find a way to break his hold.
As the kids (Pugh and Jack Lowden) grow into young adults, we see the family starring in wrestling shows in the civic centres of Norfolk.
Half-packed crowds go wild as Saraya (now Britani) and Zak (ring name Zak Zodiac) hurl each other against the ropes.
Tubby Ricky is transformed into Rowdy Ricky Knight, while Julia is the vampish Sweet Saraya (confusingly using her daughter’s real name as her stage name).
These events are more World Of Sport than WWE, but they’ve tried to import some gimmicks from American wrestling.
“Will you take a bowling ball to the b ***** ks?” Ricky asks Union Jack, a large gentleman who is held together by patriotic spandex. “Okay,” he squeaks after a bruising experiment in Ricky’s office.
Refreshingly, writer-director Merchant never looks down on his gallery of hard-working oddballs.
This may be the family’s business, but they are always in on the joke.
This very British comedy gives way to an inspirational US sports movie when Zak and Saraya audition for US outfit WWE.
Saraya is selected for a wrestling camp in Florida, but Zak is told that he does not have the X Factor.
When Saraya, who adopts the stage name Paige, discovers that the other female wrestlers at the training camp are all models, she wonders whether motormouthed trainer Hutch (a funny again Vince Vaughn) has made a mistake.
“I love your accent,” one tells her. “You sound like a Nazi from a movie!”
Paige has to find her own voice if she wants to survive to the next stage of the auditions.
“Don’t worry about being the next me,” producer Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson tells the wrestling siblings in a hugely entertaining cameo.
“Be the first you.” That’s a pretty standard message for an inspirational Hollywood movie.
But Merchant chooses this moment to subvert it by turning our attention to Zak, who has just seen that other Hollywood message, “Hold on to your dreams”, come crashing against reality.
While his sister is living the high life in sunny Florida, he’s falling apart in rainy Norwich.
Lowden is so heartbreakingly brilliant as Zak he nearly overturns the whole enterprise.
But Merchant steadies the ship with a formulaic final act that gives us a low point, a training montage and slightly confusing finale.
Up until this point in the film, the characters have been bracingly honest about the fact that wrestling is fixed.
But Paige gets into the ring for a world title fight and we are suddenly expected to believe that it’s real.
This wrestling move sent my head spinning, but I found my heart soared
regardless.