'The Smashing Machine' is too nice.

I don't know if 'this character is too friendly' is good criticism, but Mark Kerr is too fucking friendly. There's the occasional off-scene where he's unable to explain himself and kind of shells up, there's the 'explosive moment' you expect going in, though even that feels quiet comparative to what we usually get. Dwayne (yeah, I call him Dwayne) is great at playing a very nice chap, naturally, and there's an Oscar nomination incoming. I don't know, the character on the page is too nice to really derive much out of him, all it does is make the Emily Blunt character into a #certifiedcrazylady, one of the great gaslighters of our time, and it seems even the film acknowledges the 'mental health' excuse as a bandaid to cover up an abuser's behaviour.

That niceness does have its benefits, though. A lot of what Safdie is parsing through here is the disconnect between the inherent violence of the sport and the niceness of both Coleman and Kerr, compared to their hard-knuckle, typical muscle-man opponents. That only Americans are nice people doesn't harm the movie, but I just realised that, and it's amusing. His form, and more importantly, the structure of the movie mirror that; this is a fall and fall further movie, not a fall then rise again. Any other typical biopic would play his rehab as a lead into the third act, where he finally wins again and would probably use the potential Coleman/Kerr fight as a hope for a brighter tomorrow, detached from the drugs. 'This isn't a smashing machine, this is a smashing man.' Credits roll.

Ironically, that would be more of a bummer than what happens instead, where Safdie uses his obsessive niceness as a presumptive ticking time bomb. The idea that this man with stars in his eyes, living off the high of having his name called out, a real 'saves your neighbour's cat out of a tree' type, could maintain his composure given his size, his weight, and drug abuse, AND LOSING, seems infeasible. He's out of rehab before we're halfway done, and instead the rest of the movie is about his becoming an actual, breathing person, and how codependency has ruined him and Blunt. It's a far more interesting angle to take, though still a little sterile just because of the extent that it's things happening TO him, and his lacking agency is never really explored beyond the surface of it all.

I don't know if the real Mark Kerr is like this (nor did the lady in front of me, who was googling him while watching the biopic movie all about him), or if it's some hidden puff piece smothered beneath some rapturous Safdie magic, but he seems too nice. Too nice.