You have to get dinged around a bit by life before you can make a movie like Fat City<\/em>, a film that dwells in disappointment without making a big deal about it. Set on Stockton, California\u2019s skid row, the largely plotless picture stars Stacy Keach as Billy Tully, a genial never-was whose semi-promising boxing career was cut short due to women and drinking. Or maybe he just wasn\u2019t any good. Pushing 30 and swearing he\u2019s gonna get back into fighting shape soon, Billy spots 18-year-old amateur Ernie Munger fooling around at the YMCA and sees something of himself in the kid, for better and worse. Played by an impossibly young Jeff Bridges, Ernie is soon being coached by Billy\u2019s old manager Ruben (a pre-Cheers<\/em> Nicholas Colasanto) and finds himself in the ring for a few underwhelming bouts. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Billy briefly takes up with a gregarious barfly (Susan Tyrell, Oscar-nominated for the role) while her husband Earl\u2019s in the can. Earl\u2019s belongings are all packed away in a box in the closet, which is where Billy\u2019s stuff will be when Earl gets out. \u201cIt\u2019s just how things are,\u201d the ex-convict explains. Ernie ends up with a wife and son about as passively as he ends up with a career as a fighter — he\u2019s the kind of guy life seems to happen to without him giving it much thought either way. Some days the men work as day laborers on onion farms or harvesting tree nuts, other days Billy day-drinks. The movie builds to a big, bruising match so sloppy and anti-climactic the winner needs to be told that he\u2019s won. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Huston was a boxer himself back in his Hemingway-esque youth, which might account for the movie\u2019s easy authenticity. (He retired in 1959 with a record of 20-7-1<\/a>.) Real fighters like Sixto Rodriguez and Curtis Cokes fill out the supporting cast, and the film is full of grace notes such as the boxers in Colasanto\u2019s stable all having to share the same pair of trunks, swapping them between bouts no matter how bloody they\u2019ve become. (It\u2019s also appallingly funny that he nicknames the non-Irish Ernie \u201cIrish,\u201d because white fighters bring in better box office and \u201cthis way people will know.\u201d) Such touches feel like they\u2019re from lived experience, and obviously Huston knew a thing or two about hangovers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fat City<\/em> drifts in and out of the characters\u2019 days with little in the way of momentum and would probably feel as purposeless as these people\u2019s lives, were it not for Gardner\u2019s novelistic details and Huston\u2019s amiable eye. These run-down, single-room rentals and dingy dive bars are photographed by the legendary cinematographer Conrad Hall with an admirably unglossy appreciation for their ragged beauty. The soundtrack keeps returning to different arrangements of Kris Kristofferson\u2019s \u201cHelp Me Make It Through the Night,\u201d and Huston\u2019s entire aesthetic feels keyed to the unassuming poetry of Kristofferson\u2019s bleary, whiskey-and-Marlboro vocals. The singer\u2019s \u201cSunday Morning Coming Down\u201d might also have made an appropriate theme song, but Fat City<\/em>\u2019s atmosphere of an eternal present is best summed up here in the lyrics: \u201cYesterday is dead and gone \/ and tomorrow\u2019s out of sight.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n These people all talk past each other – most amusingly when Colasanto monologues about another new prospect who might make it to the big time while his wife, who has undoubtedly heard this a thousand times, politely falls asleep. The characters in Fat City<\/em> don\u2019t need to be understood, they just want to be heard. And besides, most of what everybody\u2019s saying is all rationalizations and excuses anyway. (The film\u2019s funniest scene finds Colosanto explaining to his boys how wonderfully they fought and that they would have won were it not for the crooked judges, while everybody looks on with faces pummeled into hamburger.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n There are so many ways this picture could have gone wrong. It\u2019s easy to imagine awful, poverty-porn approaches in which these characters were romanticized or worse, pitied. But Huston regards them all with a characteristically steady gaze. Fat City<\/em> is a film about life on the margins but it\u2019s never doleful or depressing. \u201cIt\u2019s just how things are.\u201d “Fat City” is streaming on Amazon Prime<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/12\/fat-city-1024x783.jpg\")
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