Heartbreaking boxing drama will floor you
Journeyman 15 cert, 92 min
Dir Paddy Considine Starring Paddy Considine, Jodie Whittaker, Anthony Welsh, Tony Pitts, Brendan Ingle, Paul Popplewell, Matt Insley
Paddy Considine’s Journeyman is a film about a boxer. But is it actually a boxing film? Considine himself plays Matty Burton, a world middleweight champion from Sheffield whose prime you sense has recently crested. But we only see him in the ring once, for a hard-won title defence during which he sustains a grave cranial trauma that throws his entire life into a daze.
The real fight in the film is Matty’s struggle for recovery – in which victory means turning back into a functioning husband to his wife, Emma (Jodie Whittaker), and father to their baby girl, Mia. His identity as a lover, provider and local hero has been totally dismantled, and what we’re watching him rebuild is his own masculinity – which is by no means a subject that cinema has a proud history of handling with any degree of intelligence or tact. But with its arsenal of big, honest emotions, deployed without show or sentiment, Journeyman is an exception.
Boxing is the backdrop to Matty’s story, informing and framing every single shaky step of it. Yet with the exception of that opening fight, and its preambular hullabaloo, the sport itself isn’t really there at all. It is both completely integral and beautifully beside the point.
Journeyman is Considine’s second feature as writer and director, after his 2011 domestic violence drama Tyrannosaur: it’s significantly easier on your nerves, but if anything it leaves your heart even more comprehensively skewered. The brave simplicity of its plot is complemented by performances of rare power and detail – not least from Considine, Whittaker and, as Matty’s young professional rival, Anthony Welsh.
Acting out disability is a notorious minefield, but Considine sensitively underplays it – a little humming and tutting, a finger raised hesitantly to his chin or lip, a constant sense he is trying to mentally reach back through time to find the man he once was. He makes the tics talk.
Considine resists the usual narrative urges to bring down any kind of judgment or redemption, or to “make sense” of Matty’s story beyond the sense he himself can make of it. The film is not looking for a scapegoat. It just lets its characters live.