Fat City

#16 in my ranking of John Huston’s filmography.

Often seen as John Huston’s return to form after more than a decade of largely less successful films, Fat City is a solidly good look at two men moving in opposite directions in the same grimy corner of the lowest levels of professional boxing. The eponymous Fat City is the goal men yearn for without ever being able to achieve (echoes of a bunch of Huston work from The Maltese Falcon to Key Largo to Moby Dick to The Misfits to A Walk with Love and Death), and both men react to the impossibility in their own ways. I don’t think it’s one of Huston’s best films. In fact, I think it fits rather well with his “tired period”, as Vincent Canby put it, but it’s just that the script is better than most of what he had been working on for about a decade.

Billy Tully (Stacy Keach) is a former boxer who had some real promise but whose career fell apart after he married. Thinking of getting back into it, he shows up at the YMCA to just practice when he meets the eighteen-year-old Ernie Munger (Jeff Bridges) who, without any real experience, presents himself well enough for Tully to tell him to go to his former manager, Ruben (Nicholas Colasanto), to ask for a tryout. Each man has a woman in his life. Tully finds Oma (Susan Tyrrell), a broken, middle-aged woman whose boyfriend, Earl (Curtis Cokes), gets sent to prison, and they move in together. Ernie has Faye (Candy Clarke), a high school student about a year his junior.

The movie is about how the two men, Tully on the other side of his height and Earl at the beginning of a potential climb, and the film shows the two navigating similar issues around women, money, and physicality in and around the ring. It’s this interesting contrast of events as Earl tries desperately to get into the ring, eschewing sports film cliches by having him lose as much as he wins, while Tully does everything he can to avoid the ring, taking random jobs, ultimately becoming a regular in the fields raking, picking up walnuts, or picking onions out of the ground. His home life with Oma is haunted by Earl’s presence, represented by the last of Earl’s things in a box in the apartment. Ernie, on the other hand, is facing down a life of adulthood, especially when Faye announces that she’s pregnant.

Where the film stands tall is in its specific portrayals of the two men. They are fully fleshed out individuals on the edges of society looking to find their way into the Fat City where life will be easy. All they have to do is get into that ring and win every match, and yet, life keeps getting in the way, and the two react in different ways to their setbacks. Tully keeps quitting whenever he gets knocked back, but Ernie keeps going forward whether he gets knocked down in the first round, unfairly called out on a TKO when he spurts blood from his nose but could keep on fighting, or wins. Tully wants it all, but he’s afraid of taking the steps on the path necessary to get there, relegated to drinking himself into solace whenever he has a moment, while Ernie tries to build something.

It’s a good look at two contrasting men, and Huston manages the production well. Much like the rest of his “tired period”, Huston was never less than a perfectly competent visual filmmaker. Gone are the days of him mimicking the complex blockings of William Wyler, but he still has a strong eye for capturing performance, and in Stacy Keach, Huston found an unsung leading man, especially when combined with the broken performance from Susan Tyrrell, desperately wounded, looking for any connection possible and not knowing how to manage it when she gets it.

I don’t, however, think it really sets itself apart from what Huston had made over the past decades or so. I don’t hate all of it. In fact, it’s only the immediately preceding film, The Kremlin Letter, that is actually a complete disaster. Pretty much everything else has been accomplished films that have felt off in one way or another, all while Huston has been obviously trying to do certain things, just not while combining all of the requisite elements in the right form. Fat City is really just the simplest script he’s worked over that period, the most grounded and the best written, and Huston, the director, feels to be in the same groove as before, just effectively managing the production. That the script is pretty solidly written by Leonard Gardner, based on his own novel, seems to be a happy accident.

Still, Huston comes out with a solidly good dual character study, and it works. There’s still no real fire to Huston’s filmmaking like he had in the beginning of his career, but the benefits of being a solid technician comes through here.

Rating: 3/4