There’s been a lot of jealous talk about nepotism in the film world lately, but who would really want to come into the movie world as a, what, fourth-generation Huston? There are likely swords already being sharpened for Jack Huston, the handsome, charming, 40-year-old nephew of Anjelica, grandson of Jack and great-grandson of Walter. But his directing debut, Day of the Fight, which premiered this week in the Venice Film Festival’s Horizons Extra section, is certainly worthy of the family name. It’s a little earnest, sometimes a bit too style-conscious, and Huston is inclined to put performance before story every time. But the emotional input really earns its payoff in a confident, imaginatively mounted calling card.
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For many, Huston is off to a flying start with the casting of Michael Pitt, a terrific actor rescued from a life of Dawson’s Creek himbo-dom by Larry Clark in his much-maligned true-crime story Bully (another Venice premiere back in 2001). Pitt cropped up in the disappointing Cannes entry Black Flies earlier this year, but Huston’s film will do him many more favors, tapping into the well of vulnerability that undercuts even his wildest roles and serves him well in the role of Irish Mike.
Irish Mike is a former middleweight champion of the world and now a near-recluse, having stayed out of the limelight for something like 10 years (the setting is unclear, perhaps the mid-’80s, and the black-and-white cinematography certainly helps de-age the newly gentrified Brooklyn). Now, though, he’s back on the ticket, a warm-up act for at a prestigious title fight at Madison Square Garden.
Everything that happens in Day of the Fight is what actually happens on the day of that fight, using extensive flashbacks to explain why Irish Mike is doing what he’s doing, such as stopping outside a Catholic girls’ school to catch a glimpse of his estranged daughter. He goes to the docks to pick up his mother’s wedding ring, an heirloom being safeguarded by an uncle (a brief cameo from Steve Buscemi), pawns it, and takes the cash to an illegal bookie, where he puts a lavish bet on himself.
He visits his old gym, run by his gruff but tender trainer Stevie (the excellent Ron Perlman), drops into a church to see an old friend, now a priest, and, finally, visits his abusive father (Joe Pesci), now imprisoned by dementia. All the while, Huston fills in the tragic backstory to Mike’s fall from grace. Which, as it turns out, is a pretty impressive roll-call of misadventure, one that incorporates binge-drinking, manslaughter and attempted suicide, the latter having caused clots in his brain that now threaten to bring on an aneurysm at any time.
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For the first hour, Huston’s film recalls Scorsese’s Mean Streets and its famous line: “You don’t make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets.” (It’s entirely possible that Irish Mike has seen that film, which would be a nice touch.) But will Huston dare go near Raging Bull? Amazingly, he does, and even more amazingly, his fight footage doesn’t pale in comparison. Again, Huston puts performance first, and Pitt really repays his director’s faith in him by giving a committed, and wholly transformative, account of himself.
In other ways, though, Day of the Fight doesn’t exactly reinvent the wheel, and the shadow of the $7K bet hangs heavy until the end, since there are really only two ways it can go (a tension brilliantly explored in the Safdies’ Uncut Gems). And, on those terms, you could say that perhaps the storytelling is the film’s Achilles’ heel. But as a director of actors, Huston shows immense promise, notably in a fabulous scene in which Irish Mike meets a young Black girl in the projects, a sassy, streetwise latchkey kid who loves Michael Jackson but draws the line at James Brown (“The guy that dances like crazy and faints all the time!?”).
Music is also one of Huston’s strong suits, with needle-drops for the likes of Jackson C. Frank and Sixto Rodriguez, plus a melancholy piano rendition of the Creedence classic “Have You Ever Seen the Rain.” More poignant, though, is the use of Pesci’s own music to create a moving backstory for Irish Mike’s bitter father, a failed singer who, given the evidence, could have easily been a contender.
There’s a whiff of Abel Ferrara about Irish Mike’s destiny, but Jack Huston, clearly a glass-half-full kind of guy, isn’t really about to go that way, and the film’s final introduction of color conjures up a very traditional, almost Hollywood kind of optimism. It doesn’t ring entirely true, just as certain aspects of Irish Mike’s bleak, hard-scrabble story don’t quite convince either (his last-chance-saloon fight is actually being televised). Nevertheless Day of the Fight has a soulful charm, an artful attempt to find images that match Jackson C. Frank’s haunting lyrics for “Blues Run The Game”: “Maybe tomorrow, honey / Someplace down the line … I’ll wake up older and I’ll just stop all my trying…”
Title: Day of the Fight
Festival: Venice Film Festival (Horizons Extra)
Director-screenwriter: Jack Huston
Cast: Michael C. Pitt, Nicolette Robinson, John Magaro, Anatol Yusef, Steve Buscemi, Ron Perlman, Joe Pesci
Running time: 1 hr 48 min
Sales agent: CAA Media Finance
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