Benny Safdie’s “The Smashing Machine,” a minor key chronicling of the early years of Mixed Martial Arts through the addiction and relationship struggles of fighter Mark Kerr, is fascinating for its aversion to hyperbole. Safdie, one of the most stylized and nerve-shredding filmmakers of his era, eschews the contrivance that normally plagues the genre of fighter movies, opting instead for a clean and emotionally removed portrayal of one of MMA’s foundational figures. The effect is interesting, if certainly not rousing. There are no thunderous horns when Kerr (Dwayne Johnson) steps into the ring; there are no melodramatic screeds about a fighter’s life or any dramatic license taken at all. This story is a sadly mundane one in many ways as we follow an otherwise kind man addicted to the juice of bloody adulation in the ring and the chaos of a home life plagued by the woman he loves (Emily Blunt). As is the case with every high, there is a crash, and crash Kerr does, over and over again, in a manner that places the audience intimately in the center of someone else’s messy, emotionally violent life. A fight film that feels so stylized that it feels styleless, “The Smashing Machine” is either a sputter or a triumph, and I frankly can’t yet tell which.
The largest factor around which the film orbits is the seismic cultural and metabolic heft that is Dwayne Johnson. The WWE Superstar and action movie staple, Johnson, has been chasing cinematic supremacy for years, often utilizing wrestling-style kay-fabe and bravado in an attempt to muscle projects of questionable quality (Looking at you, “Black Adam” and “Hobbs & Shaw”) into the hearts of moviegoers. These efforts have been tepid at best, yet Johnson remains a central figure in culture, if only by the locomotive nature of his natural charm. As Mark Kerr, Johnson is digging into every nook and cranny of his acting abilities, trading in his arena-sized antics and motor-mouthed charisma for the inherent softness of a man with the bulk of a mountain and the soul of a mouse. Kerr is quick to smile, often eager to speak with elderly women in hospital waiting rooms and patient with the natural language barriers of journalists in Japan, where he fights with PRIDE, one of the original MMA promotions. Safdie, with his first solo directorial effort, is clearly a fan of Sofia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation” as a good portion of the film is devoted to Kerr wandering the bustling streets of Japan, walking among the locals like a giant among children. He is beloved in his adoptive country, one of the titans in a growing sport that many in America believe to be brutish and outlawed. Kerr, several years into a crippling opioid addiction, lives in a perpetual haze, a swirling soup of narcotics and malaise only penetrated by the roar of the crowd after a victory. In these moments, staring out into the darkness, hearing his name chanted by faceless masses, he is who he was always meant to be. The ring is his stage and his opponent’s body is his instrument, a reality Safdei punctuates by scoring each fight with the rat-a-tat of a drum solo, as if composer Nala Sinephro were improvising in response to each bash and smash of Kerr’s destruction of his opponent, or vice versa. Johnson’s reverence for Kerr is marrow deep, and he envelopes himself in the role as much as he possibly can, somehow transforming his body into an even more ridiculous peak of fitness and utilizing slight prosthetics in an attempt to fool audiences that they are looking at a forgotten fighting pioneer and not one of the world’s most recognizable faces. And the gambit works, mostly. There’s something endearing about Johnson pushing himself outside his comfort zone, if also something a bit cloying about how desperate he is for artistic legitimacy. In “The Smashing Machine,” he eagerly gives himself over to Safdie to be clay for molding, and does end up doing justice to Kerr, whom he so clearly idolizes. As a vehicle for contemplating the interiority of a man for whom violence is a form of zen, the film is a fascinating document. As a coronation of Johnson’s acting ability before the world and the Academy, it’s far from a knockout.
I struggled with “The Smashing Machine.” I was uncomfortable for much of the runtime, a Safdie feature, and I feel that might have been the point. Nothing overtly barbaric occurs outside the ring, beyond the volatility of Kerr’s relationship with his girlfriend Dawn (Blunt), a woman slugging it out with her own demons who is either his salvation or his damnation depending on her mood. She enables him, as many who love people struggling with addiction do, but then resents him for being clean on the other side of sobriety. Blunt, for her part, seems eager to worm herself into the sticky crevices of a woman who can’t find firm purchase yet is doomed to love a man who will always love the crowd more. If Kerr is devoted to anyone, however, it is to his friend Mark Coleman (Ryan Bader), a fellow MMA fighter with whom the pair shares an intimacy that is in no way romantic but is somehow more. What Kerr won’t do for Dawn, he might do for Coleman, a man who perhaps understands his fellow warrior more than any “civilian” ever could. The movie never states this overtly, Safdie is too good a filmmaker to fall into those tropes, and yet the evidence is laid out before the audience that Kerr might be trapped in a sisyphian curse of his own design, forced to tear his body apart again and again for just the smallest hit of concentrated adoration while unable to see what is already around him. The film presents the man as if the subject of a nature documentary, the camera left to linger on the sadness behind his eyes, searching for meaning in his unknowable introspection. Kerr loved to be observed, to be witnessed, and that is how Safdie presents him to us, a gladiator as much embattled in his home as in the arena, for whom victory might be perpetually out of reach.
The best scene in the movie is one where Kerr and Dawn spend time at a carnival. Dawn wants to ride the Graviton, yet Kerr is concerned because of his sensitive “tummy”. Dawn tries to explain that inside the Gravitron, you don’t know you’re spinning and instead float impossibly in the artificial stillness. Time speeds past, yet you stay still. Kerr opts out, instead deciding to ride the merry-go-round, where there is no illusion, and Dawn can watch him go around and around. There is something insightful about these two perspectives: the Gravitron, chaotic yet serene, and the merry-go-round, tempered yet visible, that seems to present Safdie’s thesis on the life of Mark Kerr, a gentle man who found joy through violence and just wanted to enforce some calm amongst the chaos, to be seen and to be loved. Don’t we all.
“The Smashing Machine” is worth considering, though don’t expect to leave the theater shadow boxing. As the film’s ending surmises, there is no lasting high for those who bleed out beneath the lights, only a hope for peace in the mundane afterglow of glory.
Give the Gravitron a spin.
You’ll be glad you did.
“The Smashing Machine” is playing at The Broad Theater and Prytania Theatres at Canal Place.
