Roll up, roll up for the scintillating, intoxicating, discombobulating Mike Tyson show.
James Toback, the consistently fascinating talent behind Two Girls And A Guy and The Pick-up Artist is, at first glance, an unlikely bedfellow for The Most Dangerous Man in the World. One hails from a privileged Jewish family and was educated in Harvard. The other was born in poverty and was schooled on the streets.
Like his subject, however, Mr. Toback has always been a sports nut and a ladies’ man of some distinction (Spy magazine once published an impressive list of Toback’s sexual conquests.) His 2001 hip-hop movie, Black And White, a film that featured one ‘Iron Mike’ Tyson, notably counterpoints the colourful beats of ethnic culture with the sterility of the white middle class.
Together, the filmmaker and boxer make for compelling chemistry as evidenced by Tyson, a big K.O. of a movie in which the former undisputed heavyweight champion talks and talks and talks. Taking us through his squalid childhood, the salvation offered by the ring, the high times, his very public divorce from Robin Givens, that highly dubious rape conviction and his retreat into Islam, self-abuse and finally, family life, this is stark, poignant auto therapy.
The director gussies up the central conceit – Tyson on camera featuring killer clips from fights and tabloid scuffles – with inventive split-screen and competing angles. But the film always keeps its eyes on its prize subject, who emerges with considerable dignity.
Yes, the champ is still mad at Desiree Washington (“that wretched swine”), former manager Don King and any number of people who absconded with his millions. But the dominant picture to emerge here is of a hard done by fellow who still can’t talk about his first coach Cus D’Amato without tearing up, who knows exactly where it all went wrong, and who speaks respectfully, if not adoringly about his former opponents and two ex-wives, including Ms. Givens who, as fight fans can tell you, famously dismissed their marriage as “torture, pure hell, worse than anything I could possibly imagine” while he sat silently beside her on Barbara Walter’s couch.
It’s complicated. Mr. Tyson calmly explains how he came to bite a hunk out of Evander Holyfield’s ear in terms that conjure the image of a spoiled child and that of an animal gnawing its own leg off to escape from a trap. This is typical of both the man and the movie, this strange alchemy where primal rage meets tremendous vulnerability. “I’ve always had too much love to give”, he says with regret, “But I could never take love.”
If he’s lying about that or anything else then he’s much better at acting than he ever was at punching.