The most shocking part of The Iron Claw is Zac Efron outacting Jeremy Allen White.
Sorry, no.
The most shocking part is when you Google “Von Erich brothers” and find out that the movie left out an entire brother named Chris, who died by suicide reportedly because he felt insignificant. This maybe isn’t as gross as when a documentarian used AI to make the ghost of Anthony Bourdain say things he didn’t actually say while alive, but it’s close enough to slap writer/director Sean Durkin around a little bit.
Durkin told Entertainment Weekly he left an entire human being on the cutting room floor so that he could shoehorn in repellant tearjerker bullshit like an imaginary scene in heaven. Sorry, what he actually said was “You could make nine hours of The Godfather on this family. I didn’t have that opportunity, so I had to make choices of what could fit in a movie.” The most accurate part of that statement is where he suggests “you” could make The Godfather because ain’t no way Durkin could.
Nowhere near as upsetting as axing Chris, a real person, from his family’s fictionalized history because a filmmaker wanted to include repetitive shots of sweaty dudes exercising, but The Iron Claw is maddening. It has a crucial, salient message that is bungled. If this were a film only loosely based on the real Von Erich boys, its message about the curse of narcissistic Boomer daddies would resonate louder than a stiff-heeled boot stomped in a wrestling ring. That is, provided you overlook the painfully stilted dialogue and the fact that, performance-wise, the High School Musical guy dances The Bear back into the kitchen.
If professional wrestling is a large cultural blindspot for you like it is for me, here’s a primer of the plot. As depicted in the movie at least, Fritz Von Erich (Hold McCallany) was a very small coward whose desperate need to feel like a big strong man led him to essentially torture his kids, several to death. His wife, Doris (Maura Tierney), watched Fritz force his children into sports. In the 70s and 80s, Kevin (Efron), Kerry (White), David (Harris), and Mike (Stanley) became professional wrestlers of varying degrees of acclaim. Chris did too, but who has time to chronicle that man’s life when there’s a training montage to show?
When Kevin meets his future wife, Pam (Lily James), he tells her basically “Oh hey, by the way, this may not be relevant, but ever since my older brother died when he was five, my family thinks maybe we’re biblically cursed.” He cites his dad’s decision to change their last name from Adkisson to Von Erich as the cause but was only right in that the source of the problem was his super-douchey pappy. The family’s rise to wrestling royalty is intercut with an almost unfathomable series of tragedies.
It’s only almost unfathomable here because the culprit is so clear. Fritz is a cancer. He and so many fathers of his ilk came from even worse men before them, each passing along gnarled and twisted notions of self-importance and both explicit and passive violence. He is a manipulator and abuser running a cult populated by people sharing his DNA. He is an everyday monster, an often-overlooked beast that many folks still think they have to “love” because family is an obligation.
Speaking of dads, it’s funny that Durkin name-checked The Godfather in defending his repellant decision to narratively erase someone’s grave because The Iron Claw so clearly wants to be a mob movie. In structure if not subject, it moves to Coppola’s beats and sways to Scorsese. Honestly, great decision. Why? Because the ideal audience for this movie about the need to sever the unbroken chain of failed fatherhood is made up of men who speak the language of mafia movies.
Hilariously, the film is also simultaneously a bro-y version of Little Women, albeit with a much more horrifying body count. If Louisa May Alcott’s classic was a family-heavy tale about young ladies finding their way in the world, The Iron Claw is a cautionary warning to young dudes that says “Please do not make your way in the world like this.” The writing, painting, and sewing in the former is replaced with weight lifting, bleeding, and sweating in the latter, but the point is oddly the same: Wrestling is bad.
Sorry, no.
I mean, yes, insofar as all sports likely began as masculine emotional crutches. Maybe we should get ESPN to air “Competitive Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.” Anyway, the point The Iron Claw and Little Women share is that we must all be careful in considering the people we would like to be, taking only those parts of our siblings and parents that make us stronger, better, and most importantly, kinder.
What’s the verdict? Efron’s graceful, quiet, pensive, nuanced himbo is spectacular, and the film’s message is urgent. But the script is self-indulgent, with laughably functional dialogue and jarringly disconnected performances. Oh, right, and then there’s that thing about Chris…
If it seems like I’m hung up on that, I am. As I said about Oppenheimer, the problem with these kinds of movies is that they are now our history. We don’t have to like that, but we do have to admit it. It doesn’t matter that there are ways of finding out what “really happened.” This is now how it really happened. I didn’t know who the Von Erichs were two days ago. If I hadn’t decided to do extra research, I wouldn’t have known one of those men who tragically died ever existed.
For so many people, he will be stitched out of time. He will be removed from public memory, severed from his family again. It is fine for movies to borrow from real-life. We also have documentaries, which is a genre of film that anyone is allowed to make if they want to tell a true story. If you want to make a fictional retelling of what happened to real people and you don’t show what happened to those real people or don’t explicitly change enough to tell the world this isn’t what actually happened to real people, you have failed as a filmmaker and arguably as a human being. It is a decision about a person’s legacy that hits the movie’s message in the head with a folding metal chair.
Grade = F
Other Critical Voices to Consider
Shah Shahid at Nerdspin says “Director Durkin does not play up any one angle too much but creates a great balance of emotions that will make audiences laugh, smile, relate to the family dynamic and ultimately be a part of the emotional whirlwind that the story goes through.”
Sarah Vincent at Cambridge Day says “Recreating the on-screen high points of the family’s boisterous television promotions and wrestling appearances including the infamous Ric Flair, Durkin reflects his admiration for the sport and its theatricality, making depictions of the vocation’s pitfalls sympathetic, not a mocking exposé.”
Felix Vasquez at Cinema Crazed says “While The Iron Claw has every chance to fall prey to melodrama and exploitation, it’s a very respectful and humble depiction of a well meaning family with a love for performing.”