“Christy” Doesn’t Capture the Real Woman at the Center of the Ring
All biopics start with good intentions. The first instinct when you hear about the remarkable life of someone who isn’t in the mainstream is to tell others about them. World history is full of people who lived fascinating lives known to very few, and biopics can be a way of introducing them to everyone. Such is the case with director David Michôd’s film Christy. Unless you were tuned in to the world of boxing in the 1990s and early 2000s, the name Christy Salters may not ring any bells. Unfortunately, Christy struggles to make a lasting impression.
Christy Salters (Sydney Sweeney) grew up in Mullens, West Virginia, and was always a sporty kid. Basketball was her preference, but she ultimately focused her efforts on boxing. Her wins around the state of West Virginia caught the eye of James V. Martin (Ben Foster), who became her manager and, later, her husband. As Christy’s career gained traction, her relationship with James grew fraught. He was controlling and abusive, pushing her to fight more and more to fund an extravagant lifestyle. One of the frequent causes for arguments was Christy’s sexuality. She had an off-and-on relationship with a woman named Rosie (Jess Gabor) that went back to high school. As a boxer, Christy is credited with putting women’s boxing on the map.
Courtesy of Black Bear. Photo by Eddy Chen
The reason humans are drawn to stories of tragedy and triumph is that we hope one day, should we find ourselves in a similar situation, we will have that same determination to make it through to the other side. Christy lived through homophobic ideologies of her family and the time period, the brutal workout regimen a boxer needs to succeed, domestic violence, and an attempted murder. It’s unsurprising that her story would be one worth telling, but it’s the manner in which Christy goes about telling it that takes away from who the real Christy Salters was.
Courtesy of Black Bear. Photo by Eddy Chen
No one should be reduced to only the worst things that have happened to them, yet that’s what Christy does. Within the first five minutes, we see her family berating her for running around their small West Virginia town with a girl, making everyone think she’s a lesbian. They couldn’t care less that she just won an amateur boxing fight and pocketed $300. It’s a baffling choice to introduce us to Christy this way, but it remains a constant throughout the film. When the movie ends, the audience has a rough understanding of the timeline of Christy’s life (the movie spans 1989 to 2010), but next to no idea who Christy the person is. We don’t know how Christy found herself at that first boxing event, which, one could argue, is essential to a movie about a woman whose life still revolves around the sport. As the film goes on, we understand that she takes the sport more seriously because she sees it as an escape from her life and her small town, but that first match is arguably one of the most important pieces of Christy.
Much of Christy is, unfortunately, Christy experiencing violence at the hands of her husband. That’s the reality of her life at the time, but Christy is also a person who experienced joy and had an incredibly impressive boxing career. The wide time period Christy seeks to cover, even with a two-plus-hour runtime, means it has to cut some corners. It’s a story that would be better told in limited series format, but the decision to gloss over the intricacies of the person at the heart of the story defeats the purpose of telling the story to begin with. We see some of her fights, but they mean very little to the audience. It’s difficult to care when we don’t know how or why she picked up the gloves in the first place.
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