Ahead of its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, Sydney Sweeney's turn in Christy earned press for the reportedly incredible physical transformation she took on for the role: 30 pounds and a brunette wig. This suggested the Euphoria star was wilfully pushing away from her bombshell persona to stretch in her latest, the David Michôd-directed biopic, where she plays brash boxer Christy Martin. But Sweeney's range doesn't reach where Christy needs her to go.
Yes, some critics are cheering Sweeney's performance as the best of her career, and it certainly plays to the sweet spot of Oscar. Like Nicole Kidman in The Hours or Christian Bale in basically every movie he does, Sweeney has a physical transformation that rejects the Hollywood ideal. Plus, she plays a literal fighter, like Oscar-winner Hillary Swank (Million Dollar Baby) or Robert De Niro in Raging Bull. But Sweeney does not have the screen presence or intensity of either, and Christy suffers for it. However, the film on its own is beleaguered with problems.
Christy is a mixed-up melodrama about American boxer Christy Martin (née Salters) aka The Cold Miner's Daughter.
In the 1980s, Martin began a boxing career that would lead to groundbreaking moments like becoming the first woman that boxing promoter Don King ever signed, and the first female boxer to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated. However, Christy is less interested in Martin's accomplishments and more in the agony she suffered behind the scenes. Her pain came less from the punches she took in the ring, and more from her homophobic mother's ruthless intolerance and the domestic violence delivered at the hands of her abusive husband.
In the first act, Christy is established as a butch lesbian, whose relationship with her "friend" Rosie (Jess Gabor) has offended her mother Joyce (Merritt Wever). While Wever is a terrific actor who brings emotional weight to every line here, the archetypal role of unaccepting mom is so doggedly one-note that it's flat-out comical. The screenplay by Mirrah Foulkes, Katherine Fugate, and Michôd makes this mother so consistently horrific that she feels like a parody, plucked from actual comedies like Walk Hard or the more restrained TIFF offering Maddie's Secret. In Christy, Joyce exists purely to say hateful things to her daughter. While Michôd aims for seriousness, all of Wever's dialogue basically boils down to campy proclamations like: Christy, why do you have to be so lesbian and break my heart?
When it comes to the marriage of Christy to Jim Martin, her trainer and abuser for decades, Michôd's approach is also confounding. Ben Foster plays Jim, wearing a hairy fat suit and a comb-over wig that just gets more aggressively ugly as the years pass by. Their marriage has many of the red flags of an abusive relationship (and a slew of Lifetime movies), including Jim's recurring promise that if she were to leave him, he'd kill her. The contrast between Christy being a fighter in the ring but assaulted in her own home is the film's central focus, with her queer repression taking a backseat until the third act. Within this abuse storyline, Foster's chewing scenery (and his lower lip) and Sweeney is out of her depth.
Sydney Sweeney is not an Oscar contender in Christy.
Don't buy into the hype. This movie is a mess, and Sweeney is a contributor to that, not its highlights. For one thing, she uses Martin's West Virginia background as an excuse to slap on a thick Southern accent that comes and goes. For another, while her look is different in Christy, it doesn't read "athlete," as she lacks tone and physicality.
With all the personal melodrama, the actual boxing gets lost in Christy. Sweeney can't throw a convincing punch, so Christy's knockouts don't hit like those in the Rocky movies, the Creed movies, or even Girlfight, which used white frames to suggest contact of the boxing gloves to powerful effect. Michôd's boxing scenes lack punch in choreography and execution. However, the director shows a much more deft hand at recreating the violence happening at home.
A pivotal sequence late in the film finally clicks into a tone that feels consistent with Michôd's work in the acclaimed Animal Kingdom. Perhaps because true crime is his comfort zone? Abruptly, the details of movement and dialogue become sharply specific, with Christy having a short phone conversation unlike the rest of her dialogue, and slipping into a pair of sneakers before acknowledging her scowling husband. What follows is gripping and horrifying, as the actors deliver the kind of re-enactment that briefly elevates this floundering melodrama to something scarier and more real.
Yet, it's unnerving to me that the strongest sequence in this movie, the one that feels most like this is why Michôd, Sweeney, and Foster made it, is one where the heroine is savagely attacked. Why is that the part they seem most determined to get right? And yet — while this is Christy's most powerful scene, it's not its best bit. That's all Katy O'Brian.
Katy O'Brian is Christy's blessing and curse.
The Love Lies Bleeding actor has been stealing scenes in big Hollywood movies like Twisters and Mission: Impossible — Final Reckoning. And in Christy, she effortlessly shows up Sweeney, playing the eponymous boxer's professional adversary Lisa Holewyne. Let's be clear: Katy O'Brian should be a big damn star.
In Christy's bid to be rich and famous, she didn't just fight in the ring, but talked smack about her opponents outside of it. So it goes in this industry. But in the film, the focus of this promotional persona is Christy leaning into a femme look — floral dresses, pink boxing shorts — and wielding slurs at her peers. Lisa bears the brunt of these comments, yet becomes an unlikely ally to Christy in the film's final act. This is good news for audiences, because O'Brian has the kind of star power this movie needs.
Her stature, muscles, and carriage are all more in line with what audiences expect of an athlete onscreen: confident, sturdy, and strong. Sure, Martin's real look was softer than some of her opponents. But in any sequence that pits Sweeney and O'Brian in competition, be it boxing or jogging while training, the later's ease in these spaces makes the headliner's lack thereof stand out all the more. Beyond the physical, in appearance and performance, O'Brian delivers an alertness in every scene that dazzles, while Sweeney just does not. O'Brian is alive in every moment, even when she's second banana. It came to the point where I became infuriated that she wasn't the lead of this movie, resemblance to the real Martin be damned!
Despite the premiere buzz, Christy is not the Oscar contender that Sweeney, who also produced the film, seems to have swung for. Its script is a mess, creating clumsy archetypes and hitting on Lifetime movie cliches with no self-awareness. Its ensemble cast, while committed, cannot agree on a common tone. For instance, Chad L. Coleman, who pops up as a flashy and fun Don King, brings laughs and much-needed energy to the movie, but also ends up further muddying what this even is. Michôd has no grace in the tonal shifts, and so Christy is more confusing than moving.
Michôd seems most riveted by the criminal violence than any other aspect of Martin's story. So even what this film has to say about being a woman in sports, or a lesbian in America, or a person at all, is perplexing. In the end, Christy doesn't hit hard. It just blows.
Christy was reviewed out of the World Premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. The movie will release in theaters on Nov. 7.
