Movie Reaction: Fighting With My Family

Formula: Ready to Rumble / The Wrestler

When it comes to my obsessions at different points in my life, it started with He-Man*. After that, it was Power Rangers. Next was Professional Wrestling. Magic: The Gathering followed that. Since then, it's been my holy trinity of TV, movies, and college basketball. While I don't watch WWE at all anymore, I still have a fondness for it. It's hard to describe the appeal of wrestling to non-fans. Everyone knows it's not "real" in the strictest sense. It's heavily scripted. The moves are planned and practiced. I can't stress enough how much fans realize that it isn't real. (Please stop saying "wrestling isn't real" like it's some kind of revelation. I promise, you are sound like an idiot when you say that.) But wrestling plays with verisimilitude in a way that isn't replicated in any form of entertainment. Wrestlers build personas like old-school vaudevillians. They are lived-in, fleshed out characters that can take years to create. They are real even if they are characters. The wrestlers are professionals in every sense. They pull off incredible physical feats. They practice hard to know what they are doing. One mistake could end with you or someone else breaking there necks. By the end of a wrestling career, these men and women's bodies are beat up. The wrestlers and promoters want the lines to get blurred about what is and isn't real. To this day, I can't say if the Montreal Screwjob was real or not. The fact that I'll never be fully convinced one way or the other is an incredible accomplishment when you think about it. I get that the specific brand of entertainment that wrestling provides isn't for everyone - I lost interest a long time ago - but I have nothing but respect for the people who love it.

*My parents insist that I was a huge fan, but - hand to god - I have no memory of any of this and still think they are gaslighting me.

I was very ready to love Fighting with My Family, Stephan Merchant's new film which tells the life story of current WWE performer, Paige. Paige showed up on the scene only a few years ago well after my days as a fan, so I don't know much about her. I certainly don't know the facts of her real life or WWE career, so let it be understood that, unless otherwise stated, when I refer to Paige, I mean the character in the film not the real Paige.

The film begins with Paige (Florence Pugh) living in a small, working-class town in England. She and her family - mother (Lena Headey), father (Nick Frost), and brother, Zak (Jack Lowden) - run a local wrestling promotion, scraping by with money made from shows and training local kids. The dream is for Paige (real name Saraya) and Zak to one day become WWE superstars. They both eventually get the chance to try out for the WWE, but only Paige is selected, which sends both siblings into a tailspin. Paige has to fly to Orlando, thousands of miles from everyone she knows, and Zak has to pick up the pieces of his shattered dreams. The movie follows Paige to Orlando, where she quickly realizes that she doesn't fit in with the models-turned-wrestlers who are being groomed alongside her. The film doesn't abandon Zak though, as he learns to cope with the new path his life must take. Mostly, it's about Paige going through WWE's NXT program though with Vince Vaughn as the demanding coach and drill instructor, very much reprising his role from Hacksaw Ridge.

The cast carries the movie. In about a year, Florence Pugh has become one of the actresses I'm most excited to see (thanks mostly to The Little Drummer Girl and finally catching up with Lady Macbeth). It's very hard to root against her Paige. She doesn't fit in with most crowds. She's a natural outsider, but she's honest and hard-working which makes her very likable. Headey and Frost as Paige's parents are a silly treat with occasional bursts of sincerity. Jack Lowden ends up being the emotional core of the film and handles it nicely. I liked seeing LA to Vegas' Kim Matula show up as one of the other women in the NXT program even though she doesn't have much to do. It's mainly Pugh that keeps it all going though. She's a tremendous talent. And, despite his small frame, she never seems physically outmatched.

More than anything, I appreciated how the film took this all seriously. This isn't Ready to Rumble, the disastrous David Arquette movie that I've seen more than a couple times for reasons I can't explain. Fighting with My Family doesn't talk down to wrestling fans at all. It's clear-eyed about the appeal of professional wrestling - why people like Paige and her brother would dream of being WWE champions - and recognizes the physical and emotional toll that life takes. The fact that WWE studios and Dwayne Johnson produced the movie probably helps explain that. I do think the movie takes some shortcuts that will bother WWE fans. I went and watched the real match that's used as the climax of the film and they are very different. It was also annoying how the film suggested that the climactic match wasn't mapped out beforehand. Paige would never be making things up during a live TV match. That's not how wrestling is done. She'd be fired for going off script in her first match. I get how this works for dramatic effect in the film, but it flies in the face of everything the film has been telling the audience before that.

I had a lot of small issues with the movie that built into bigger issues. There's too much plot. Paige's NXT training in particular felt underserved, covering a lot of the beats through montages. The suggestion that the well-trained and incredibly experienced Paige would struggle so much in NXT during drills, falling behind the other women who are new to it all, isn't very believable either. The movie had trouble picking a tone. A lot of that falls on writer/director Stephan Merchant, directing his first film in nearly a decade and second film ever. The film can't seem to figure out when it wants to be a comedy and when it wants to be a drama. Its heart is in the right place, so I forgave a lot of the problems I had with the it. It's far from perfect, but I enjoyed it plenty.

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend