shadowboxer

i liked shadowboxer very much. this is a little, ambitious-slash-pretentious film that i suspect no contributors to this blog will want to watch unless dragged to it by wild horses — i hope i’m wrong. helen mirren and cuba gooding jr are a team of hired killers who are also (adopted) mother and son and lovers. their different colors (as in skin) and age difference makes them triple taboo breakers, which of course is one of the main attractions of this film. director lee daniels is not timid about this. rose and mickey are frequently shown in bed and in various tender situations. their love for each other is, arguably, the main focus of the film. the visual representation of their relationship, though, betrays hidden complications. in one scene, mickey is asleep at the bottom of the bed, curled up, while rose lies normally, head to bottom. in the extras, lee says he didn’t want to show them side by side. i don’t know what kind of hierarchy he meant to emphasize, but the racial one is the one that jumped at me in that moment, even though mickey’s fetal position at the bottom of the bed evokes the mother-child theme as well.

mickey is very masculine and very black. he’s always shadowboxing, and often bare-chested or naked, so his glistening dark skin and his powerful, muscle-packed physique are strongly foregrounded. in the samurai assassin tradition of le samurai and ghost dog, he’s quiet and self-contained, lonely and melancholy, as if he’s carrying a great deal of hidden burdens. unlike delon and whitaker, though, he is not alone. he’s got rose, and rose is dying of cancer. mickey’s love and devotion to rose border on the subservient, yet they didn’t feel distasteful to me: to the contrary. i enjoyed rose’s self-absorbed assurance, her implicit reliance on the fact that mickey will do her bidding, because so much is stacked again her: she’s older, she’s very unhealthy, she’s a withering white woman who was beautiful and formidable but is now a shadow of herself. maybe she’s the shadow mickey boxes. but rose’s implicit reliance on mickey felt reassuring rather than exploitative to me. i see this in long-term male-female dyads all the time, yet this common way in which men and women relate to each other in the real world, or some pockets of it, (the woman easily leaning on the strength and willingness of the man) is rarely shown on film. fourth taboo-breaker, i guess.

there are also moments in which it is mickey who takes rose for granted: in one scene he comes back from a job and asks rose how she’s doing; she says she’s in terrible pain and he fixes her a coffee. mickey shows concern and sympathy, then seamlessly segues to, “will you give me a bath?” in the next scene, rose is pouring water tenderly on mickey’s body while mickey sits comfortably in the tub, lost in his private world, innerly focused. [SPOILER] later on, when they quite literally adopt a mark and her newborn baby (in her old, softer age, rose cannot bear to kill the woman when she sees she’s about to give birth), rose insists that mickey hold the baby. mickey does so reluctantly, then walks away. rose, who had seemed oblivious to his discomfort with the whole mother-and-baby situtation, follows him with a knowing look.

because of all the race, gender, age, and incest stuff, there is much in this movie that requires unpacking. but i’ve rewritten this a few times already, so i’ll leave it at this, hoping that someone else will see this and chip in. gooding and mirren give excellent performances. this is a difficult film to pull off, and it seems to me these two succeed very well. rose and mickey are clearly dealing with demons, but i really liked the way the demons never impact the love they have for each other. in samurai-like fashion, they hold the demons inside and fight them privately, not allowing them to make them bitter or angry. or, rather, the anger gets formalized and contained and becomes a job you leave at the door when you come home.

stephen dorff stars as the very bad baddie.