The Braddock and Baer match affords the film its climax, but it's the face-off between Crowe and Giamatti that gives it bite. Neither performer is at the top of his form here -- Crowe's crowning achievement remains The Insider, Giamatti's, unsurprisingly, is Sideways -- but they duet nicely. Crowe, his face more sharply beveled than it has been in years, plays Braddock as a reluctant warrior, a good guy who seems almost abashed to lead with his fists. The actor doesn't pump up the heroics, which would have been a poor fit for the unassuming Braddock, but breathes life into the Everyman that both the country and its sportswriters needed. Out of the ring and opposite Giamatti, Crowe eases into the boxer's soft side, at times beautifully; in the ring, he's repulsively believable.
Giamatti does a lot of his acting with his eyebrows, which doesn't make the performance any less enjoyable. Gould was as much fixer as manager, and the actor makes you see the man's every angle as cleanly as if they were drawn with a ruler and compass. In his book, Schaap repeats one contemporary observer's theory that if Gould had been a better manager, Braddock would not have suffered so many career downturns. Howard and his collaborators don't test those particular murky waters, but they make sure we see boxing is an ugly game no matter how likable the players. In one of the most effective scenes, Gould frantically urges Braddock to break his opponent's nose and "fill his face with blood." This is a fight movie where the blood doesn't dribble.
With a killer of a sports story and two top-flight actors, Howard can't go terribly wrong. A fine craftsman, the director has in recent films been drawn to increasingly darker themes, perhaps because, in the age-old calculus of mainstream production, dark equals heft. In his last film, The Missing, a taut western pegged to the hoariest frontier cliche (white women kidnapped by marauding Indians), Howard employed a somber palette and let (or just watched) his two leads, Cate Blanchett and Tommy Lee Jones, cut loose. The director pretty much repeats the same formula here, aided by the same talented cinematographer he used for The Missing, Salvatore Totino, and his longtime editors Mike Hill and Dan Hanley, whose hard cutting intensifies the blunt force of every punch.
The fights are brutal, at times floridly so, and crucial to the film's own blunt force. Like some musical song-and-dance numbers, they break into the main storyline, providing much-needed relief from Braddock's gratingly soft-focus marriage. Taken together, the fights also create a leaner, meaner parallel narrative. One of the satisfactions of Cinderella Man is that, in the end, the story that unfolds inside the ring is not the same one that Howard, his screenwriters and the composer Thomas Newman seem keen to sell. Their Cinderella Man is the decent little guy who affirms what movie people call the triumph of the human spirit. The story Crowe tells, with Giamatti riding shotgun as a gleeful Mephistopheles, is that of a man who, having sampled the blood of others, clearly enjoyed the taste.
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