Sincere account of repairing a human life
Stronger
15 cert, 119 min
Dir David Gordon Green Starring
Jake Gyllenhaal, Tatiana Maslany, Miranda Richardson, Clancy Brown
Stronger has all the ingredients for primo awards bait, starting with that self-helpish title, though sadly lacking the Sugababes song over the end credits. It’s derived from a memoir of the same name by Jeff Bauman, a blue-collar guy who lost the bottom half of both his legs in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, and faced a struggle to rebuild his life.
It’s the ordinariness of Bauman that makes him a good character for Jake Gyllenhaal to have picked. Amid all the strenuous work he’s done lately, in the likes of Southpaw and Nocturnal
Animals – not to mention his near-film-ruiningly silly appearance in
Okja – this regular Joe is a mercy from the start, and he builds a really solid performance from those foundations. It’s the inner turmoil after Jeff ’s maiming, rather than the external nature of his injuries, that gives the film its grit and point.
The capricious career of director David Gordon Green (George Washington, Your Highness) finds a comfortable middle ground here in terms of adult subject matter, though
Stronger has stalled badly at the US box office. Too depressing? Perhaps it’s just lacking the heart-on-sleeve emotionalism and family appeal of Wonder, which has wildly eclipsed it. Stronger is a tougher sell all round, in part because of Green’s sincere efforts to capture a persuasive feel for working-class Boston here, which feels salty and ribald but not hammy in a Departed way.
Dusting off a bawdy accent with the best of them, Miranda Richardson has a generously showcased part as Jeff ’s hard-drinking mother, who gets carried away with all the localhero publicity, and books him a guest spot on Oprah without asking. In a more widely-seen film, she’d be fast-tracking her way to an Oscar nomination, but the role as it stands is a good reminder of her gifts for bringing a tough, slightly selfish, not-wholly-sympathetic character to three-dimensional life.
Tatiana Maslany is even better as Erin, the ex-girlfriend. Negotiating their not-quite-relationship through all the stages of Jeff ’s hospitalisation, subsequent despair, and false recoveries is a harrowing ask, but she’s up to it: a real person, trying her best, shines through, and she’s very moving.
The structure cannily avoids milking the moment of Jeff ’s incapacitation for either cheap suspense or dodgy political import. The horror and chaos is postponed, coming back to him later in a flashback: the film has enough on its mind with the repairing of one human life, and quietly refuses to make some sort of figurehead out of him.
For all these reasons, this is not Gyllenhaal’s Born on the Fourth of July moment, by any means, but just because Green’s film is less pushy doesn’t make it negligible. It’s one of those decent, well-acted, non-revelatory efforts destined to be filed under “this had awards buzz” .