When we consider Wiseman’s dance films, Boxing Gym should be right in there. I’m not trying to be cute. Boxing Gym is another Wiseman sharp turn that’s actually more straight ahead than you’d think. Going from ballerinas to boxers, he maintains an interest in orchestrated movement, difficult training, physical stamina, and acknowledgements about the effects of age. It’s also a kind of community film, a place where professions, diverse groups and ages, and pretty much equal numbers of men and women all devote themselves to punching speed bags, shadow boxing, exercising, and sometimes going into the ring. The setting is no longer the Palais Garnier, but the love of rhythmic movement still feels pretty strong. While the action is not as graceful and the teaching is more loose and casual, this is still a film of people dedicated to the physical and trying to get in shape while learning the special techniques required.
The special character of this boxing gym feels very Austin-ish, a cool neighborhood place that has some pro boxers and mostly amateur locals, people who just like somewhere to hang out, exercise, and learn to box. They look pretty serious about their avocation, and they also like to talk a lot. The veterans with actual fights to their credit seem to have too many stories about bouts they lost, and some appear to have fallen in and out of the profession. The place is actually called Richard Lord’s Boxing Gym, and Wiseman amusingly photographed the bottom half of a sign outside to become the title card for the film. Mr. Lord’s small office is the only place where anything resembling a meeting happens, and these are mostly of new people signing up for the loosely defined memberships - come whenever you want and do what you’d like. There are a bunch of trainers or coaches or managers or whatever their roles (same problem as La Danse of knowing what to call them, only now it’s not ballet masters and choreographers), who both assist with workouts and offer a great deal of instruction. When the film starts, Lord is in the ring with a young kid, calling out punches with commands: "1,2,1,2,fade,fade,1,2,1,2,slip,slip.” In a later session we have what he calls “the code” of these commands explained to us, but already it’s like we’re back in a ballet rehearsal room - a teacher calling out movement instructions to a student. To underscore the similar setup, we get a couple more arrangements of teachers and students - one particularly similar to our last movie - a teacher doing movements that two boys are following - trying to repeat both his punches and fancy footwork. We then see the first of many females in the film - a young girl practicing punches, as Lord talks to the girl’s father about how it’s good she’s starting early, close to what teachers back at the ballet school would say about their young charges too. Many sequences in the film are wordless, just the sound of punching bags and feet and arms moving, sequences of rhythm and motion. As a trainer tells a new participant early in the film: "The first couple of times you're in here, the main thing to get down is just rhythms.”
It feels like an enjoyably loose movie, but big ideas and large issues do find their way in, at least obliquely, and mostly from conversations. Like I said, this is a meetings-light movie, as free of them it’s safe to say as any Wiseman film. But it was during filming that the Virginia Tech shootings happened, and one member talks to Lord about the stepdaughter of a colleague who was shot. There’s a second discussion a bit later, three guys speculating on how they’d handle a situation like that. I think it would be hard to claim that this violent act winds up in here because some larger point about violence in America is being made that links to the boxing gym. I’m more inclined to feel like the camaraderie and good cheer so much in evidence suggests outlets for violent impulses rather than drawing much of a connection. People are just enjoying themselves too much, and caught up with their involvement in the sport. For laid back dudes, their enthusiasm for what they’re doing just bubbles over. Odes to boxing just pop out, like one guy saying "That's what boxing's all about. pushing through. . . . even though I got punched in the face harder than I've ever been punched, I just felt fantastic. . . . I felt great. I'd done something I’d never done before." That’s just a little tidbit from a conversation that goes on to compare boxing styles of several champions with the attention of devoted fan/practitioners. Violence feels like something that happens elsewhere. There’s too much appreciation of the sport going on. I thought a woman signing up her husband for a fortieth birthday present had it about right: “It’s about the art. It’s about learning what it’s like to stand in the ring.”
Links to the military might also seem suggested, but there too this bunch is not going to run out the door and enlist. Still, we get a couple of guys chatting while working out as one discusses doing his basic training and then going on to Officer Candidate School, and then to Ranger School. For some reason things haven’t worked out, and he expresses disappointment at not having been deployed because “I joined the Army to go to combat.” What he’s doing now feels more like an alternative activity than a step towards this goal. While we also see lots of push-ups and other routines that have their own basic training parallels, this just does not look like a place you’d go to whip yourself into shape. More typical is a mohawk-headed young kid who learns outside in the back how to pound a big rubber tire with a sledgehammer for exercise (naturally someone teaches him the right way to do it). It’s kind of nice to see people enjoying sport, and to see so many different people doing it, sometimes with little babies along for the ride and occasionally in Spanish.
Another type of art being practiced is cinematic. The occasional stylistic playfulness feels in keeping with the informal vibe of the place. These aren’t the gorgeous high art compositions of La Danse. This feels like a style in keeping with the joint. My favorite of departing just a bit from his perfect direct style, is how Wiseman handles a really terrific sequence of two shadow boxers, one male and one female, not boxing with each other, but both working out in close proximity. We hear musical-sounding grunts as they move around the ring, and halfway through, we cut to just watch their feet as they dance around. It’s something of a break from the Wiseman approach of full bodies in motion, but it’s an extra little bit of admiration that we can feel is a little light playing around. Kind of similar is a seeming tangential moment of two guys talking, one of them a Latino musician who starts to explain Columbian cumbia, a kind of music and dance. He begins to explain it by beating out a rhythm, but then knows the only way to really explain it is just to get up and dance, and when he does, we’re sure to see the footwork involved too, which in this context looks a lot like boxing. More determinedly arty perhaps and another departure from customary observational cinema style is the calculated placement of the camera down on the floor near a bunch of boxing gloves, as a woman times a guy running back and forth in the ring, picking them up one at a time. It almost looks arranged for the sake of being filmed, but surely it wasn’t. One last example or two of moments heavy on style has to include what feels like practically a tribute to another Austin resident, filmmaker Terence Malick, who has had an occasional thing for actors popping up under clotheslines. Even if it’s not a quote, you still have to admire the composition that results from oblique camera positioning as a teenage girl practices her ducking moves by going back and forth under a line stretched across the ring. And also in the ring is a nice routine of five guys leapfrogging over each other as the camera keeps up, further unexpected artistry.
More serious perhaps is what felt like a keen appreciation of age, and like the mention of forty as a serious cutoff point for ballerinas in La Danse, forty here too comes up more than once, the slightly older guys who refer to it may already have overestimated when boxers start to decline. One still hoping for pro fights talks about how he’s now 41 and worries about “upcoming fighters . . . gonna be so swift.” He might as well be an aging ballerina talking about young dancers. It’s weight as well as age when we see a heavy fellow with his coach, repeatedly hitting against the training pads being held up for him and breathing quite hard. He doesn’t say anything, just keeps painfully hitting away until his time is finally over. “Good work, papa” his coach says at the end, acknowledging that older guys are going to have a tougher time of it. (It’s ironic too that woman who’s getting the fortieth birthday present for her husband, the time it can only now be for fun.) Things turn a bit more wistful at times, as in our only foray out of the gym, when Lord leads a group in training up quite a bunch of circular parking ramps. On the way back, we get a rather ominous shot of a cemetery, the worst kind of reminder of where aging leads, and far from the last cemetery we’ll see in a Wiseman film. More wistful is the end, where in a final montage we get a good look at an old gray guy shadow boxing alone in a ring near a mirror - it’s almost like another version of how Scorsese aged and fattened up Jake LaMotta in “Raging Bull”, one of the many fight posters on the wall. This little glimpse is short, but somehow seeing the guy in front of the mirror still going through the motions resonates recognition of age, also then sharply contrasted with that young mohawk-haired kid pounding on a tire.
Let’s just take a last moment to appreciate Wiseman again choosing what seems like an odd out-of-the-way subject and making it appear like almost the inevitable next choice. That’s what great artists can do: embrace a broad swath and leaving us feeling like it all belongs, a talented eye looking at things all over the place in his own special way. All that, and in this case too for some reason, Dolby sound. I guess so all those punches register clearly, which they certainly do. It’s not the deepest Wiseman film, but it’s easy to love.