By now there’s little ground left to break within the Mockumentary genre, a fact only reinforced by Robert Kolodny’s The Featherweight, a handsomely mounted biopic of former featherweight World Champion Willie Pep dressed in fussy, nonfiction clothing. Prolific cinematographer Kolodny takes on his first feature with enthusiasm and careful attention to period detail, though its paint-by-numbers plot and almost cartoonish reliance on calcified Italian-American stereotypes saps the life out of its fly-on-the-wall imagery. Think Raging Bull as directed by the Maysles brothers, tinged with the familiarity of contemporary reality TV, and you have a rough idea of what’s coming over the film’s 99 minutes.
The washed-up boxer, now in his 40s and living in his hometown of Hartford, Connecticut, is looking to mount a grand comeback as the pressures of aging, financial debts, and the creeping shame of personal failure take their toll. The documentary crew that follows him and his family around is part of Pep’s last ditch PR effort to drum up support and cement his place in history after what he feels was a premature and undignified exit from the sport, though it’s more warts-and-all than one would want as a piece of image manipulation. Pep’s anger is barely tempered under a veil of mid-century, male charisma. Part chauvinist pig, part loving jokester, it’s a combination befitting an angry man constantly railing against his thwarted entitlement and the people around him who he feels are conspiring to hold him back. James Madio is a vigorous and charismatic actor, and tackles Pep’s insecurities with aplomb, but just as his manager (Ron Livingston) and former coach (Stephen Lang) quickly lose faith in Pep’s comeback, Madio’s performance wears thin before the end.
Adding extra creaks to The Featherweight’s overly familiar characterizations is Pep’s young second wife, Linda (Ruby Wolf), an aspiring actor whom Pep never takes seriously; and his son Billy (Kier Gilchrist), a wannabe beatnik constantly at odds with the stepmother he resents. The whole ensemble does an admirable job to work through the familiar beats of Steve Loff’s screenplay; Wolf in particular is winning as the underappreciated outsider in the entrenched dynamics of the Pep extended family, and provides the film’s most potent counterpoint to Pep’s raging toxicity, though her aspirations are, understandably, secondary.
Kolodny’s lovingly realized world of boxing gyms and Nonnas’ kitchens is hard to take much issue with; he is clearly an admirer of the cinematic era on which The Featherweight is riffing. Indeed, the first 20 minutes of The Featherweight are a refreshing reprieve from the industrially mandated gloss that robs most contemporary biopics of grit. The film wears its unexpectedly warm patina, aided by lush film grain and a muted color palette, with genuine ease. The real disappointment, then, comes with the eventual monotony of the visual style, which stubbornly adheres to overused rapid zooms and affected handheld jostling that recalls the sometimes nauseating visual language of Succession; and an, at first natural but eventually overplayed, acknowledgment of the cameras and filmmakers that have invaded the characters’ lives. Rather than the groundbreaking documentary forms of the early years of the 20th century’s latter half that truly immersed the viewer, Kolodny’s approach is to clump together a variety of styles, leaving the governing aesthetic drawing too much attention to itself.
DIRECTOR: Robert Kolodny; CAST: James Madio, Ruby Wolf, Keir Gilchrist, Stephen Lang; DISTRIBUTOR: mTuckerman Media; IN THEATERS: September 20; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 39 min.
