I just saw Dwayne Johnson, Dany Garcia and Stephen Merchant's filim about WWE Superstar Paige, Fighting With My Family, and I loved it.
You will notice that I specifically said that Fighting With My Family is a filim about Paige. I did not say that Fighting With My Family is a biographical movie about Paige. There is a distinction between the two, one that the producers, director and subject have all been open about. In and of itself, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this. While some of the events and sequences in Fighting With My Family are at variance with documented history, these variances are not intended to deceive. They are not thrown in to make the subject look like either a hero or a villain she is not.
A side note on this. It is extremely difficult to make a novel into a filim. It is even more difficult to squeeze events spanning years--such as in Valkyrie--or even weeks--such as in Der Untergang--into a couple of hours. Cuts have to be made, not all the relevant real-life personages can be portrayed, which means many such personages have to be amalgamated into one fictional avatar to represent them all. Hardy Krüger's character in A Bridge Too Faris an amalgamated avatar of the real-life Heinz Harmel and Walter Harzer, just as Vince Vaughan's "Hutch Morgan" in Fighting With My Family is an amalgamated avatar of several WWE trainers, something that has already been noted elsewhere.
Likewise, with a so-widely known and documented face, person and personage such as Paige, it is damn near impossible to get any actor to perfectly resemble the original. This is not unusual. Baby-faced Chris Hemsworth looks nothing at all like the rugged-face, high cheek-boned McLarendriver James Hunt he portrayed in Rush, while John Turturro and Oliver Platt are very clearly not the Billy Martin and George Steinbrenner they played in The Bronx Is Burning. Likewise, Florence Pugh is visibly shorter than the five foot nine Paige, even when Paige is not standing next to her. And, although Pugh curses several times in the filim, she does not quite succeed at getting away from her received pronunciation, or "posh" accent, and sounds a lot more like Diana Rigg in The Avengers, Lalla Ward in Doctor Who, and Barbara Kellerman in The Sea Wolves than she does the real Paige.
These are all elements that are inevitable when trying to squeeze years into hours while getting someone else to play a real-life person who, unlike, say Alexander Hamilton or Otto Graf von Bismarck or Sir Edward Carson or William III, has been so heavily photographed, filmed and recorded. Elements that are completely avoidable are producers and directors taking the bare bones of the story of a real-life person and make them seem either more heroic, or more villainous than they are, or exploiting that story to make a greater sociological point those producers and directors are particularly enamoured of. There has been some suggestion that the filim version of the real-life Lou Gehrig was tweaked to boost morale in time of war, and there is ample documentation that that real-life story was heavily modified for the big screen. On the other end, the George Hamilton filim on Evel Knievel was consciously fabricated in such a way as to make Knievel to be the avatar of everything that was pathological with America at the time.
Fighting With My Family falls somewhere in between these extremes. It is certainly not a hagiographyof Paige. Far from it. Rather, in one sequence, which seems to be an avatar of several experiences and not something reproduced verbatim, Paige comes off as having deep-seated prejudices of her own. This sequence does not make the Paige of Fighting With My Family a villain. It makes her human, since it shows her to look beyond the surface of others to see the pain inside, pain the Paige of Fighting With My Family shares.
As well, the very title Fighting With My Family is both meaningful and somewhat deceptive. It is meaningful in that Fighting With My Family is most emphatically not Paige: The True Story Behind The Legend, the way Gary Cooper's aforementioned Lou Gehrig filim is centrally about Lou Gehrig. The rest of the Knight/Bevis family play a part equal to Paige in the movie. The title is deceptive in the fact that the movie is not a filim about a Hamlet-style open war within a family, and the Fightingelement does not involve a family polarisation of the kind of Brett Hart and Martha Patterson-Hart versus all of Brett and Owen's other siblings for the rights to Owen's name and to their parents' affection that took place in front of the media at the turn of the century. Rather, it is the story of the road taken and the road not taken, with one sibling each struggling with loneliness and regret on each road in quasi-isolation from the other sibling. In that sense, the Fightingof Fighting With My Family closely resembles the duel between "the Jackal" and Commissaire Claude Lebel in The Day of the Jackal, neither character having an abundance of scenes with the other.
On a not entirely unrelated point, the trailers show Zak Zodiak, Paige's brother, at one point encouraging Paige to go on to the WWE for the sake of the family and, at another point, venting about how Paige took his dream away. Both of these trailer scenes are in Fighting With My Family, and both remain within Zak for a majority of the filim, contradictory as those sentiments seem to be. This is one beauty of the filim. At one point, it mocks Harry Potter the way Mark Twain, In Huckleberry Finn, mocks Sir Walter Scott. On a serious, more long-term, scale, it shows that, unlike Harry Potter, humans are not either purehearts or blackhearts all the livelong day, but rather that real-life humans oscillate eternally between the two.
On another not entirely unrelated note, Lena Headey's and Nick Frost's performances as Julia and Ricky Knight were delicious. Lena Headey, famous for playing Sarah Connor, and infamous for playing Cersei Lannister the Belfast-bashing Game of Turds, once remarked that she would much rather play comedy. In Fighting With My Family, she is happy and it shows, just like it did in Imagine Me and You and St. Trinians. As for Nick Frost, in Fighting With My Family, he finally stands out like a man, showing an immense evolution from being Simon Pegg's eternal sidekick, as well as secondary characters in Pirate Radio and Attack The Block.
Another beauty of the filim is that it is a hidden "John Galt" from Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged story with none of "Galt"/Rand's grandiloquent arrogance. The Knights/Bevises are working poor. They would be very well at home with the people Jessica Bruder describes in Nomadland, both in their socioeconomic situation and in the fact that they hustle to better themselves. They hustle, however, in a non-criminal manner. As I mentioned above, the Knights/Bevises do not speak in the received pronunciation. But they do not behave like characters who do not speak in the received pronunciation often do in filims and TV. They may have something in common in terms of social origin and accent with the guest-stars on The Sweeney and the characters in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, or the Warleggan family of Poldark--or,more to the point, like the vast majority of English YouTubes mopes like Sargon, CharmingMan/Mitch et al-- but, for the time depicted in the filim, however, they do not act like criminals.
Related to this, Fighting With My Family reinforces something that has been said about crime and the criminal justice system in America, namely that conviction and incarceration can be correlated with class. Ricky Knight is white. But he does not come from the same class as Max Mosley of Formula 1 fame. Before Max Mosley became involved with Formula 1, he was the son of Sir Oswald Mosley, the Mark Collett of the era, and he, Max, was reportedly involved in violence against Blacks/Africans. Why, then, did Ricky Knight go to jail for violence (before Paige was conceived, much less born) when Max Mosley did not? A more than plausible explanation is that Max Mosley was able to afford a higher-end barrister while Ricky Knight was unable to do so.
The real Paige has said something to the fact that the filim is overwhelmingly accurate. Now, from being an historian, I know that one of the least reliable sources of any individual of interest is that individual, since that individual has interests and an image to protect. Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House On The Prairie books are about 1% truth, 1% fiction and 98% dramatic over-embellishment, in which regard the sole difference between Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane's contemporary Anaïs Nin is that Wilder's heavy costuming and make-up of her life's story is of G rating as far as the MPAA is concerned. When Leo "Da Lip" Durocher, Howard Cosell and Evel Knievel spoke (or, in Durocher's and Cosell's case, wrote...books...) about themselves, they only put out there what they thought would make them look, not necessarily "good," but, rather, they way that they wanted to be seen. So, as much as I am a fan of Paige, I cannot rest at merely taking her word about the overwhelming authenticity of the filim. What I can say about Paige, however, is that, up to this point, she is not a sneaking, conniving, vain egotistical bastard like Da Lip, Cosell and Knievel were. She does not make, and has not to my knowledge made, herself out to have been the smartest, most righteous and unfairly maligned person in every life situation she has encountered, nor has she deliberately gone out of her way to alienate every manager above her and every journalist who wrote about her. Unlike Da Lip, Cosell and Knievel in their lifetimes, I can say that Paige has a heart, has empathy for other human beings and has the capacity to see beyond her own interests. She admits that she has flaws, something Da Lip and Cosell never did, and something Knievel only did when he was dying, after, of course, "finding Jesus."
It is these flaws that made Fighting With My Family possible. Much like its contemporary Cobra Kai (The Karate Kid: The Next Generation), Fighting With My Family is not a "good versus evil" story, as much as it is a story about overcoming adversity. The protagonists are the Knight/Bevis family, and, to an extent, "Hutch Morgan" and the avatars of NXT female superstars. The antagonist is not some human/humanoid Darth Vader or Voldomoort, but rather hard luck and circumstance and physical obstacles. Fighting With My Family is about overcoming the latter three, very much in the same manner that Cobra Kai is. The Paige of Fighting With My Family is very much like "Tory" and "Johnny Lawrence" of Cobra Kai. Like "Tory" of Cobra Kai, Paige has had to fight for everything she has. Like the multi-dimensional "Johnny Lawrence" of Cobra Kai, (as opposed to the uni-dimensional blonde and barefoot Darth Vader "Johnny Lawrence of The Karate Kid) Paige is a human being who has to fight her own inner demons and her own weaknesses in order to triumph.
In this sense, Fighting With My Family has a universal appeal that this year's Avengersmodel does not. The Avengersare all super-humans. Paige, the Knights and the others portrayed in Fighting With My Family are ordinary, relatable human beings with doubts, with hurt and with pain, which they fight and overcome.
This is something a lot of people can relate to, and perhaps even aspire to, in 2019.
That being said, since Fighting With My Family is not a hagiography, I cannot allow this entry to, in turn, be a hagiography of it. I have to point out things I did not like about it.
The fact that Florence Pugh is visibly smaller than the real Fighting With My Family is possible to overlook, but the fact that she cannot get away from her received pronunciation makes her performance less authentic, and makes her more like Lady Marion Crawford (Michelle Dockery's role in Downton) play-acting. The archive footage shown on the Knight's TV "at the time Paige tried out" dates to the turn of the century, before Paige was thirteen.
Fighting With My Family makes it look like Paige was a) selected by "Hutch Morgan", b) put to training in NXT, c) had her crise de conscience, d) returned to NXT, and then e) debuted against and took the title off of A.J. Lee in that exact sequence with zero interims/entractes. In real life, Paige qua Paige, and qua NXT Women's Champion, had NXT matches against Summer Rae and Nattie Neidhart. She was far from speechless in her match against A.J. Lee, contrary to what is depicted in the filim, which also omits a third, non-referee person who was in the ring at the beginning of that decisive match. The speechless Paige facing off against A.J. Lee in Fighting With My Family is superb in Paige/humanity's conveying internal fear and doubt, but that is not what happened in real life, live and documented and seen by many.
Speaking of Summer Rae, that was one disappointment with Fighting With My Family. On Total Divas, Paige ripped into Nattieand others for speaking ill of Summer Rae, who she describes as "the only person who was nice to me when I first started in this company." There is also video footage available of Paige and Summer Rae traveling together signing heavy metal in the Southwest I do not think it would have detracted from the filim in the slightest to have had just one scene, even in passing, wherein an actress portraying Summer Rae walks up to Paige and says "Hi! I'm Danielle! Welcome to the WWE!"
Lastly, in the extras, there is a clip of the real-life Paige edited to have her saying something to the effect of "Before me, the women in the WWE were just models and cheerleaders." This is not true and the real-life Paige knows it. Not only was Nattie Neidhart--a highly trained and accomplished technical wrestler--in the WWE some years before Paige arrived, but Paige had a match with Nattiein NXT as NXT Women's Champion before she ever faced A.J. Lee for the Diva's Championship. This NXT match would have been during one of the earlier seasons of Total Divas.
I had to get these points in because, as I said, I do not want this entry to be a hagiography of Fighting With My Family any more than Fighting With My Family set out to be a hagiography of Paige. As well, there is the fact that, unlike discrepancies in filims taking, say, place in the 1940's or before, there is ample video evidence circulating about for each of the points of criticism I made above. It would not have harmed the filim for the writers to have exercised a bit more due diligence and covered their bases on these points.
These omissions aide, I would still argue that Fighting With My Family is the best filim of 2019. It is a filim of struggle and coping with it, with triumph coming in a variety of different ways. In that latter regard, it helps to broaden the mind. This is an end which is not merely good in the aesthetic and academic senses, but an nd which can be most practically useful to those who are sad and who only limited prospects for themselves.
And now, I want to end with a couple of plugs.
Paige has her own fashion brand, as dothe Bella Twinsand Natalie Eva Marie.They are all empowered female entrepreneurs. There are some who say we should empower women by eternally holding symposiae and going on marches until all publicly held companies have boards comprised majoritarily of women. A less pie-in-the-sky, more tangible way of doing your bit to empower women is to buy directly from these four brave and bold female entrepreneurs.
I first heard of this group on TSN 690. They are called Hockey Helps The Homeless, and they raise money for homeless people by hosting hockey tournaments featuring National Hockey League players and ordinary civilians.
McLaren alumni Sergio "Checo" Perez is collecting money for the victims of the recent earthquakes in Mexico through his foundation.
Puerto Rico has been devastated by Hurricane Maria. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has set up The Empire State Relief And Recovery Effort For Puerto Rico.
On the subject of Puerto Rico, Los Angeles Chef José Andrés has set up an organisation, called World Central Kitchen, to help feed the hungry, not only in Puerto Rico, but in other bad-off places in the world. Please donate or help if you can.
I also want to plug the Patreons of a couple of superb folks. First, there is Jordan Owen, superb musician and content creator. Then, there is Sunny Megatron, Sex Educator and Podcaster. And there is also director extraordinaire and podcaster Holly Randall. They are, all three, highly entertaining to watch. They have the charm and magnetic charisma of The Kylie Ireland Show podcast of a decade ago, starring the legendary, one and only Kylie Ireland and Eli Cross.