IT’S A KNOCKOUT!
You’ll be gripped by this true story of a Norfolk lass who took on the big bad world of showbiz wrestling ...and triumphed
Fighting With My Family (12A) Verdict: A gripping yarn ★★★★✩ The Aftermath (15) Verdict: Laboured and unconvincing ★★✩✩✩
Apair of British-made films hit the nation’s multiplexes this week. One of them pulsates with heart and authenticity, the other feels queasily fake.
One is a love story set in bomb-shattered Germany just after World War ii, the other explores the world of carefully choreographed professional wrestling. Of the two, oddly enough, it’s the wrestling film that feels real.
Fighting With My Family, written and directed by Stephen Merchant, is a warm, funny, moving and indeed mostly true account of a girl from Norwich who rose to become a star of World Wrestling Entertainment, the american showbiz behemoth known as WWE.
i confess to taking my seat with a stab of trepidation. The most recent British wrestling film was last year’s dismal Walk Like a panther, which felt like a feeble halfhour sitcom stretched, like Big Daddy’s leotard, almost beyond endurance.
This is altogether different, a drama which starts off as a playful comedy only to knock you sideways with its emotional depths.
inspired by a Channel 4 documentary, it tells the real- life story of SarayaJade Bevis (Florence pugh), whose working-class family goes by a ring name, the Knights. Her father ricky (Nick Frost) is a reformed thief, diverted from crime by his passion for wrestling.
This passion is wholly shared by Saraya, her mum Julia (Lena Headey) and older brother Zak (Jack Lowden). another brother languishes in prison.
a fondness for wrestling is not a prerequisite for enjoying Fighting With My Family, incidentally, any more than a love of athletics was required to cherish Chariots Of Fire.
improbably, the two films share a strikingly similar narrative arc — hope, setback, redemption — if not much else.
in Chariots Of Fire, you’ll recall, a butler placed full champagne glasses on a line of hurdles so Nigel Havers as a young lord could attempt to leap them without spilling a drop, what!
Here, when the boorish Bevises have cause for celebratory champagne, ricky despatches one of his proteges to nick a bottle from the corner shop.
He and his family are stalwarts of the World association of Wrestling, a highfalutin’ name for an outfit that operates out of a rusty old van and a sweaty Norwich gym. But Saraya and Zak have mighty ambitions, which intensify when they are both invited to WWE auditions in London.
There, they run into WWE’s most famous son, Dwayne ‘The rock’ Johnson, who not only plays himself very engagingly, but is also the film’s executive producer. Soon, Saraya has changed her name to paige and is on her way to Orlando to start the next phase of auditions. But Zak doesn’t make it, whereupon Merchant (who gives himself and Julia Davis endearing cameos as the nonplussed parents of Zak’s pregnant girlfriend), steers the film into classic counterpoint territory, flitting between paige living her dream in Florida and Zak back in Norfolk, his dream shattered and fatherhood no consolation. However, after a promising start when her busty new wrestling partners admire her Norwich vowels — ‘i love your accent. You sound like a Nazi in a movie’ — paige finds herself friendless and demoralised. The others don’t have her wrestling background — they are dancers, models and cheerleaders, chosen for their looks — but the taciturn coach ( Vince Vaughn) thinks
she lacks the necessary extra qualities to succeed.
WWE isn’t just about wrestling prowess, he tells her. It is ‘soap opera with spandex’.
Will she, like Nigel Havers, deal with the hurdles in front of her? You can doubtless predict the answer. Fighting With My Family follows a story-telling formula as premeditated as any WWE showdown.
But it is lifted above the average feelgood movie by a script that vibrates with wit when it needs to, and with sensitivity when it doesn’t, not to mention some really fine acting.
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and Lowden, in particular, are wonderful. Enormously talented though she is, she wasn’t the most obvious young actress to cast as a wrestling champ. Yet she gives a powerslam of a performance.
Keira Knightley, by contrast, is precisely the actress you’d expect to play a beautiful but drippy British Army wife, Rachael, who in James Kent’s clunky melodrama The Aftermath, based on Rhidian Brook’s novel, arrives in Hamburg a few months after the war has ended.
There, she is reunited with her decent but emotionally distant husband Lewis (Jason Clarke), a stiff upper lip on legs. He is the colonel in charge of the local rebuilding effort, no easy task given both the extent of the devastation and the resentment of the populace.
But he’s a compassionate cove, and after requisitioning a handsome house as his and Rachael’s quarters, he allows the even more handsome owner, Stefan (Alexander Skarsgard), to stay on there, along with his sullen teenage daughter, Frida (Flora Thiemann).
Ominously, Stefan is a grieving widower, while Rachael is nursing a terrible grief of her own, pacing the lovely parquet floors in a daily fug of despair. Little more than a few meaningful glances later, he’s tickling her feet under a fur rug in an idyllic log cabin somewhere on the snowy estate and she’s giggling as only Keira Knightley can, her pretty mouth half- agape in ersatz post-coital joy.
This is absolutely rotten luck for Lewis, who doesn’t know that he’s stumbled into a love triangle that could almost be called Lady Chatterley’s Luftwaffe and that his fragrant wife is sleeping with the enemy, or even the former enemy.
Eventually he cottons on. But that’s not all he has to cope with. There is a sketchy sub-plot lifted straight from The Sound Of Music, involving Frida and a brooding local youth still devoted to the Fuhrer, hellbent on treating the colonel to a bullet.
Hardly any of this is convincing, least of all when in a climactic scene, Rachael walks soulfully out of a woody winter wonderland without her or anyone else — except audiences everywhere — wondering why she hasn’t arrived by car.
It’s that kind of film, I’m afraid. One in which the snow is deeper than the characters, and the parquet floors less wooden than the plot.