Actress superb in pro-wrestling role
Is there anything Florence Pugh can’t do?
It might be a premature thing to ask of a 23-year-old actress just a few roles into a remarkable career, but I remember thinking it after seeing her in the quietly seething independent drama “Lady Macbeth.” Pugh didn’t just rock a corset and hoop skirt; she lured you into chilly complicity with a 19th-century schemer hurling herself against the iron cage of her marriage.
In the generous, bighearted new comedy “Fighting With My Family,” Pugh hurls herself against a lot of other things: the ropes of a wrestling ring, various male and female opponents, the opportunity of a lifetime. She does this while sporting a lip ring, jet-black hair and other goth-girl accouterments — all of which she wisely uses to tease out rather than sum up her real-life character, Saraya Jade-bevis, a retired World Wrestling Entertainment personality known to her adoring fans as Paige.
Before Paige earned her lucrative contract and became the youngest winner of the WWE’S all-female Divas Championship at 21, she hailed from a wrestling-obsessed family in Norwich, England. Their story, already covered in a 2012 documentary, feels hand-tailored to mainstream comedy specifications. Paige (Florence Pugh) in “Fighting with My Family” That’s partly because of the rowdy, rough-and-tumble setting and a willingness to both mock and appreciate the tricks of a physically demanding sport where nearly every blow, jab and stunt is fixed.
The affection might be calculated — “Fighting With My Family” is a WWE Studios production and boasts Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson in an amusing extended cameo — but it is also quite sincere. In the context of a sport that thrives on artifice, writerdirector Stephen Merchant spins a story whose emotions feel entirely genuine.
It helps that there are actors on hand such as Lena Headey and Nick Frost, who immediately generate a warm, wacky rapport as Julia and Ricky Knight, a boisterously affectionate mom-and-pop duo who have turned professional wrestling into a
not-so-lucrative family business. Their eldest child is in prison, but the other two, Zak (Jack Lowden) and Paige (Pugh), are eager participants at the Knights’ Norwich gym and training school, teaching kids how to wrestle by day and slugging it out in the ring by night.
Both Zak and Paige harbor dreams of WWE stardom, and both get their shot when they’re invited to audition under the unforgiving eye of a cynical, seen-it-all coach named Hutch (a sharp Vince Vaughn). Only Paige is found to possess that elusive X factor needed to advancenm.
And so she heads off to the mother of all Florida boot camps, where she faces a grueling workout regimen, crippling self-doubt and harsh jabs about her appearance and personality. Pugh piles layer upon emotional layer, every one of them convincing. The outward toughness cracks open to
reveal a vulnerability, which conceals a deeper mystery: Who is she, exactly? How can she project an authentic version of herself in a sport that demands a measure of performative rage?
“Fighting With My Family” strikes its emotional beats with a surprisingly delicate touch. Merchant, a writer, director and actor who honed his funnyman chops with Ricky Gervais on “The Office” and “Extras,” has a deft way with tonal misdirection; he keeps the laughs and the tears in separate corners before gradually bringing them into collision.
The WWE championship climax comes as no surprise, and neither do the lessons that Paige must absorb along the way, most of them having to do with authenticity and self-realization. By the end, she’s learned not to pretend to be someone she isn’t. Happily, Pugh appears to have learned the opposite.