Cinderella Man is a great boxing movie, because it is far more than a boxing movie. All boxing movies are inevitably compared to the Rocky movies, but Rocky was really a very limited movie. In truth, although Cinderella Man will never enjoy the success Rocky had, Cinderella Man is a far better movie in every way. It is also a movie that can be appreciated by people who have little interest or sympathy with the sport of boxing, because at its deepest level it is not about boxing. It is a story of love and family and sacrifice and hope. The story we see on the screen is the story of a famous (though now widely forgotten) boxer from the Depression era. However, the most important aspects of the story are not intrinsically linked to boxing. Cinderella Man in a way is primarily a small and private family story, that could be about any number of countless men and women during the Depression or throughout history who lived similar lives and did similar things, but were never made famous by the public world of boxing.

The hero of the movie is James Braddock (played by Russell Crowe), a successful boxer who falls on hard times during the Depression. In my opinion Russell Crowe is the greatest movie actor of his generation. Every movie I have seen with Crowe in it has been far better because he was in the movie. No one else inhabits a role the way he does. Often a major movie star will end up playing basically the same character (himself) in every movie. Crowe has the charisma and screen presence of a major star, but still truly gets into the distinctive character he is playing in each specific movie. In Cinderella Man, in fact, Crowe plays against his own charisma to a degree. The character of Jim Braddock is an admirable and likable but not outstandingly charismatic man, and Crowe successfully plays him that way. The other major character in the movie is Jim Braddock's wife Mae (Renee Zellweger). Mae is portrayed as a very strong, spirited, feminine woman, and also, interestingly, as a religious woman. Zellweger has a gift for evoking sympathy with her characters, and here she is particularly good in portraying Mae's conflicted feelings about her husband's boxing.

I have read a little about the real James Braddock, but I do not know the details of his life. My understanding based on what I have heard from other people is that the movie is relatively faithful to the facts, but I am sure some artistic liberties are taken, because this is a story, not a biography. It seems to me that movies are always stories, never really true biographies, and should be appreciated for what they are.

I have seen criticisms from a number of reviewers that some aspects of this movie as overly sentimental, but I think these criticisms are for the most part unwarranted, born out of an overly cynical modern mind that unreasonably expects stories to be as cynical as itself. The best stories are never ultimately cynical. Dickens, for example, was cynical about the economic and social structures of his day, but not about the humanity of his characters, and from the beginning people accused him of sentimentalism. Almost 150 years later some literary critics still call him overly sentimental, and still people read and enjoy Dickens, and he still touches people's lives, while few have read and presumably no one has enjoyed the literary critics. It would be quite a stretch to compare Cinderella Man to a work of Dickens, but perhaps there is a slightly Dickensian feel to parts of it, in its emphasis on hope in difficult times and the strength of the human spirit, its open sympathy for its main characters, and its so-called sentimentalism.

People who would accuse a movie like this of sentimentalism miss the point. Real people live this way in the real world. Real people are motivated by their families. Real people love their spouses more than life itself, and care so much for them it hurts. Real people are emotional and speak and act "sentimentally" because they care so deeply. Not all real people do these things, of course, but many do. This movie is largely about these things. That is confirmed graphically in the climactic fight scene, when the movie flashes back and forth between the boxing action and a quiet scene with his wife and children listening to the fight on the radio, his wife anguishing with every punch. It might seem pointless to flash away from the fight as much as the movie does, but the point is that Cinderella Man, like its own hero, ultimately cares far more about the private scene than about the spectacle in the boxing ring in front of thousands of people. If that is what people mean by sentimentality, then I say bring on more sentimentality.

It is also noteworthy that this movie portrays bodily attraction between a husband and wife, who are happily married and obviously have been so for years given the kids they have. This is not the normal portrayal of marriage relationships from Hollywood, and the fact that it is done without any sexually explicit scenes makes it all the more unusual. Thank God for a movie that recognizes: 1. A man and woman do not lose all romance and attraction to each other when they get married and have children; and 2. Making movie viewers voyeurs on immoral portrayals of sex is not the way to convey beautifully the attraction between a man and woman.

Although religion is not a big part of the movie, I have to give the movie credit for not shrinking from the topic. Religion easily could have just quietly not been included. Braddock was Catholic in real life, and is portrayed as such in the movie. Early in the movie we see Braddock at his dressing table handling what appears to be a crucifix on a chain. Later, his parish priest appears briefly a couple of times, and is presented in a positive light. At one point in the movie the priest and many supporters of Braddock are seen praying for him in church. Braddock himself obviously struggles with his faith during his hard times, and perhaps lapses somewhat as a result. His priest notes at one point that he has not seen Braddock at Mass, and Braddock says that he needs the money he can get from working a shift on Sundays. At a particularly low point, in a scene when Mae wants Jim to pray with her, he tells her unhappily: "I'm all prayed out." Most of us can probably identify with that feeling.

This movie raises the troubling question of the morality of dangerous sports, and obviously does not resolve the question, which could make for an interesting post-movie discussion among those with an interest in ethics, but that is an issue for another day. For the moment I will only note that, as is portrayed in the movie, for many boxers in the era in question, including Jim Braddock, professional boxing was a matter of survival, not just sport. Particularly during the Depression, boxing offered the possibility of regular and relatively high pay to men who often could not have supported their families otherwise. That does not necessarily excuse those who promoted boxing if one believes that boxing is immoral, but it certainly adds another moral dimension to the choice made to fight by the boxers themselves. [At the same time, I will note that on a second viewing I was a little bothered by the way the character of Braddock treats this issue, and by some of the ways in which he relates to his wife in this context.]

Cinderella Man is rated PG-13, and the USCCB rating is Adults. Normally the USCCB ratings, while far from perfect, are probably more valuable than the movie industry ratings. However, this is one of those cases where I do not understand the USCCB rating at all. Why this movie is not rated acceptable for adults and adolescents is beyond me. Of course the boxing scenes are violent, and sometimes a little graphic, but not overwhelmingly so. There is bad language. As I mentioned, there are no sexually explicit scenes. I don't know how many adolescents would want to see this movie, because it seems to have a relatively mature tone, but as far as I'm concerned the more see it the better. This is the best and most uplifting mainstream movie I have seen recently.