Flasz On Film

There are two types of people in this world: those who can’t stand professional wrestling because it’s fake, pre-arranged and artificially elevated way past the boundary of tolerance, and those who don’t mind the fakery because they’re there for the lived-in organic drama upon which wrestling is built. Well, there are also people who simply don’t care about wrestling at all and go through life completely unfazed by its existence, but let’s just pretend they don’t exist so that I could pretend it is not only possible but also logically valid to break down complex issues into simple binaries.  

You know, everything in the universe either is a duck or isn’t a duck. Simples.  

Pushing on, The Iron Claw directed and written by Sean Durkin (who previously directed Martha Marcy May Marlene and The Nest) is perhaps an unintended (or maybe purposeful, who knows?) cinematic tool to build a bridge between professional wrestling and a period-set biopic. Equally, because every single problem in life can be broken into a fundamental binary, every movie is either a biopic or not a biopic. And every biopic is either something you can vibe with on the basis of its period accuracy, or something you will find utterly repulsive because it will all look to you like people in costumes and wigs reciting lines to the accompaniment of period-accurate music. Which, at least to me, brings forward a case that professional wrestling and biopic moviemaking are either cut from the same cloth, or at the very least they utilize the same stitching techniques. And in a way, The Iron Claw is an unironically perfect specimen of a movie because it is a biopic about wrestling that also follows the tropes of wrestling… because those tropes are somehow symmetrical to the tropes of a biopic.  

I’m not sure I’m making any sense but kudos to you if you’re following.  

In any case, I don’t find it particularly surprising that Durkin’s movie leans so heavily into the toolbox of a modern biopic and in so doing it leverages visual techniques picked up from Martin Scorsese and to a lesser extent Paul Thomas Anderson. There is a reason why The Iron Claw opens with a slow-motion sequence where Fritz von Erich (played by Holt McCallany) fights in a wrestling match. It’s all in high-contrast monochrome, resplendent with oneiric atmosphere clearly inspired by Raging Bull. The occasional single-take crane shot where the camera tracks the tapestry of characters on their way into a wrestling match while rock and roll is blasting through the speakers is most likely a nod to Scorsese as well. Perhaps to PTA. Or maybe – just maybe – this faux-Scorsese allure is a byproduct of the simple fact that biopics look the way they do because many of them consciously attempt to mimic Raging Bull, Goodfellas and Casino and what’s happening in The Iron Claw is a clear-cut case of coincidence because the filmmaker isn’t so much interested in aping Scorsese as he is in evoking a vibe. A vibe of the kind of elevated gaudiness you’d find in a wrestling match in spades.  

Therefore, if your intentions are pure and you walk into the cinema with your heart wide open, I hope to Jesus you don’t mind the type of fakery wrestling is immediately synonymous with, or at least you are not fundamentally opposed to the idea of deploying it as a creative tool in pursuit of other means of dramatic storytelling. Because you can’t take this movie seriously otherwise. It’ll look outlandish and overdriven if you see it as a movie that takes place in a reality you recognize as one you occupy as well. Everyone is in costume here. Nobody is even pretending to try and make the movie look realistic. Between bowl cuts, bandannas, tighty-whities and double-breasted suits straight out of Saturday Night Fever, The Iron Claw is clearly attempting a look. Not a look of the 70s, but a look of a 70s-inspired wrestling match, which it then uses to embellish and reinforce the stranger-than-fiction story concerning one of the most prominent wrestling families in the history of the sport. Once you understand what’s on offer here, you will be able to attune to the experience accordingly.  

Only then will it not matter one iota that Zac Efron (who plays Kevin von Erich) looks a bit like a John Cena lookalike. Or that Holt McCallany’s character is ever so slightly out of step with what a human being should behave like. Or that Emily James (playing Kevin’s girlfriend-and-later-wide Pam) sounds like what a person who has never been to Texas thinks all Texan girls sound like. You know you are in a universe of cliches and visual shorthand, but then again it is all a part of the spectacle because The Iron Claw is, first and foremost, a tonal attempt at a wrestling match.  

Once you’ve made peace with this realization, you’ll see how powerful the narrative is and how the movie is elevated by all its performers who ham it up way more than you’d expect in a movie that’s not directed by the Farrelly brothers. From Zac Efron and Harris Dickinson (who seems to have been on a massive winning streak lately with Scrapper and Triangle of Sadness) to the aforementioned Holt McCallany, Emily James and Maura Tierney, the latter of whom truly owns the emotional core of the narrative, The Iron Claw is a wonderfully crowd-pleasing spectacle that uses dramatic beats the way wrestlers use acrobatic techniques. It swings from the ropes, applies chinlocks, piledrives the viewer on more than one occasion and even deploys the titular Iron Claw – von Erich’s signature manoeuvre – dramatically, in service of relaying the story in the most potent way possible… as well as metaphorically, because von Erich seems to have kept his entire family in the grips of his iron claw, even despite the fact it drove most of his sons to an early grave.

Thus, although laden with heightened storytelling devices (which as I just said is not only not a problem, but it essentially elevates the movie once you realize what you’re looking at), The Iron Claw coalesces into an emotionally robust spectacle about the patriarchal hold Fritz von Erich had his entire family in, the power of fraternal love and the chasm between our dreams, our abilities and our desire to live out the dreams of our parents. Durkin’s camera moves – again using well-recognizable techniques – through the landscape of this truly dense narrative and turns what should really be a barely watchable slogfest doomed to disappear from everyone’s radar the minute the awards season comes to a close into a tense spectacle elevated by the very elements that would have been the undoing of literally any other biopic.  

It just works. It may not be the most subtle or nuanced piece of narrative storytelling you’ll ever see, but The Iron Claw just finds the perfect balance between the adherence to emotionally charged visual storytelling and blatantly stylized and heightened “biopicness.” Or, better yet, it finds a good reason to weaponize that “biopicness” and turns the movie’s potential for ham-fisted schmaltziness into a bona fide asset. Hence, the time it takes to watch this movie – which is just over two hours – simply flies by. What could have been a piece of awards bait (and it might still attract some recognition from those awards bodies) is much more than what it says on the tin. It’s an intelligent deployment of all those tropes you’d normally find laughably heavy-handed in a context where the heavy-handedness is called for. It’s a drama with a capital D filled with capital-P performances and all adding up to a piece of capital-E entertainment.  

It may not be Raging Bull because it lacks the lightness on its feet or measured tactfulness, you’d find in a Scorsese movie. But then again, most movies lack those features. The Iron Claw is not a cinematic welterweight boxer who dances in the ring on tiptoes, jabs from a distance and then goes for the knockout. It’s a cinematic wrestler built like a brick shithouse, all pumped with steroids and covered in spray-on tan… who then climbs on the ropes, all ridiculous and glistening with sweat, and jumps at you with the grace of a bengal tiger you’d never expect from a unit this size. And only a second later you find yourself being pounded with drama until the referee (Sean Durkin) decides you’ve had enough. Or at least until your tag-team partner swoops in to hit the movie with a chair.