Punching His Weight

[August 22nd, 2007]

The first 15 minutes of Resurrecting the Champ constitute a sports movie only if insulting Josh Hartnett can be considered a sport. Hartnett plays a boxing reporter whose prose gets treated like a punching bag. His editor, played by Alan Alda, is ruthless: “Truth is, I forget your pieces while I’m reading them.”

If there’s something genuine in the way Hartnett flinches at this blow, maybe it’s because he’s heard that sort of thing before. Since having the ill fortune to be billed as a heartthrob in the atrocious Pearl Harbor , Hartnett has been delivering performances you forget while you’re watching them. It would be unkind—but not unfair—to note that in last year’s Lucky Number Slevin he was upstaged by a cut on his nose. Critics have been more than happy to point this out. So it’s at least interesting to observe that in Resurrecting the Champ , Hartnett accomplishes his first interesting work since The Virgin Suicides by looking cowed and shamed.

His character doesn’t have much to be proud of. He’s an opportunistic Denver writer whose newsroom machinations always leave him covering the third-page games. (He gets an especially big laugh when he tries to use his 6-year-old son to score a Nuggets assignment by telling Alda that “the Trail Blazers are his heroes.”) But then he bumps into a dynamite story: A homeless man turns out to be “Battling” Bob Satterfield, once the No. 3 heavyweight fighter in the nation. The man known on the street as “Champ” is a combined effort from Samuel L. Jackson and a gifted makeup crew. Jackson’s contribution is to abandon his usual gravity: He speaks in a reedy treble and walks with a skipping shuffle that looks like an old man’s memory of a boxer’s moves.

It’s a nifty show Jackson puts on, and nicely supported by Alda and Peter Coyote, but the movie’s hard acting belongs to Hartnett. He gathers his award-ready redemption story by lying—not in the brazen manner of Stephen Glass or Jayson Blair, but by yielding to the temptations common to reporters. He extracts Satterfield’s story by plying the indigent man with beer, and he lies to his editors to get his article the prominence he knows it (and he) deserves. Director Rod Lurie subjects him to several resounding lessons (Resurrecting the Champ is compromised in its last act by a glut of earnest speeches), but Hartnett’s best moment is a quiet one: He phones his estranged wife to celebrate his triumphant magazine debut, and his face falls in increments as he realizes the achievement hasn’t made her love him more.

“A writer, like a boxer, stands alone,” begins the monologue that bookends the picture. This sentiment is finely phrased, but it isn’t true: The best punches and paragraphs are dispensed by people who have learned from others. The same goes for acting. And what distinguishes Hartnett’s performance here from the rest of his unmemorable work is that he has finally surrendered to a director who knows how to use him properly—not as an unconvincing movie star, but as an actor whose gifts lie in looking less than perfect. Resurrecting the Champ is a movie about wanting to be better than you are, but its real lesson is how Josh Hartnett, at least this once, has accepted who he is.