Grade: D+
Synopsis: An aging boxer (Stacy Keach) meets a young boxer (Jeff Bridges) and a barfly (Susan Tyrrell).
Fat City is a gritty, unglamorous look at the life of an amateur boxer past his prime with no future ahead of him. All the performances are amazing, so much so Fat City doesn’t even feel like a movie, but rather a window into the lives of these people.
Director John Huston was sixty-five years old when he made Fat City and he’d been directing movies almost non-stop for thirty years. Like Stacy Keach’s character in the film, you can feel Huston reaching for one last shot at something special but, like Keach, he falls short.
While Fat City has realism and characterization in spades, it doesn’t really have any story. This movie could have worked as the pilot episode for a series, or the second act of a three and a half hour epic, but on its own, it’s just not enough.
Bottom Line: A slice of life movie that’s just not filling.
2 Responses on “Fat City (1972)”:
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Time Out Film Guide said:
Grade: A
Marvellous, grimly downbeat study of desperate lives and the escape routes people construct for themselves, stunningly shot by Conrad Hall. The setting is Stockton, California, a dreary wasteland of smoky bars and sunbleached streets where the lives of two boxers briefly meet, one on the way up, one on the way down. Neither, you sense instantly, for all their talk of past successes and future glories, will ever know any other world than the back-street gymnasiums and cheap boxing-rings where battered trainers and managers exchange confidences about their ailments, disappointments and dreams, and where in a sad and sobering climax two sick men beat each other half to death for a few dollars and a pint of glory. Huston directs with the same puritanical rigour he brought to Wise Blood. Beautifully summed up by Paul Taylor as a ‘masterpiece of skid row poetry’.
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Bill Cone said:
Grade: A
Gets a solid ‘A’ in my book. I first saw it on late night tv in the early 80’s and was struck by look and feel of it. On a small b&w tv, it seemed timeless, yet there was a young Jeff Bridges onscreen. I have since seen it several times, and recently purchased the dvd. Like John Nichol’s novel, The Milagro Beanfield War, this story looks at a lower echelon of society, and manages to show an affectionate portrait of humanity, with all it’s vices and virtues, without casting judgement upon them. There are no villians or heroes. The characters will never likely escape their bleak circumstances, yet the film does not wallow in grief and misery, instead treading lightly, with some humor, through these people’s lives for a brief period. You don’t need complex story structure when the writing, acting, and filmmaking is this well put together. This is an understated, but rich, film with an absolutely haunting ending. It certainly holds up well.
