That man is their father, Fritz Von Erich (played by Mindhunter<\/em>\u2019s invaluable Holt McCallany), a wrestler himself back in the 1950s, briefly seen deploying the titular move during an artful opening fight in high-contrast black-and-white (Raging Bull <\/em>much?). He raises his unruly brood of boys with a tough-as-nails demeanor and single-minded focus, manipulating them and pitting them (and his favor) against each other; he\u2019ll rank his favorites, to their faces, all while insisting, \u201cThe rankings can always change!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Their story is told primarily through the eyes of Kevin, father\u2019s favorite early on, as the family builds a mini-empire in Dallas. \u201cMom tried to protect us with God,\u201d he says. \u201cPop tried to protect us with wrestling.\u201d That\u2019s no doubt true, but Durkin also hones in on the gnarlier, bloodier details of the matches, which are frequently painful and hard to watch. Yet despite those flashes of discomfort, the first half of The Iron Claw<\/em> is squarely about the family\u2019s good times, the glory years; Pop may have been a pain in the ass, and mom (Maura Tierney) is an emotional absentee landlord, but the brothers have each other. A \u201cDon\u2019t Do Me Like That\u201d needle drop is deployed as a shot of pure joy, a sweet romance develops between Kevin and a headstrong local girl (Lily James, who has a lovely, lived-in chemistry with Efron), and M\u00e1ty\u00e1s Erd\u00e9ly\u2019s cinematography evokes the mellow, sun-kissed vibe of youth movies of the era.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Durkin\u2019s filmography to date is slim but impressive; the mere thought of Martha Marcy May Marlene<\/em> still gives me goosepimples, and his tightly-coiled follow-up The Nest<\/em> was one of the more unfortunate cinematic casualties of the COVID-19 lockdown. He\u2019s a genuinely gifted filmmaker, with an unerring sense of when and how to come into a scene, and a way of finding an image appropriate to his story\u2019s milieu, and holding it long enough to say more than any dialogue could (for example, a late sequence of Kevin bouncing between the ropes, and hitting the mat over and over). He has a genuine mastery of letting camera inform narrative, and vice versa, rather than tackling them as separate entities; it\u2019s most demonstrably present in the slow, steady push in from a wide to medium shot as Fritz delivers an ultimatum and proclamation in the ring, while slyly and devastatingly announcing a shift in the family\u2019s priorities in the process. He doesn\u2019t move the camera all that much, but when he does, it matters \u2014 like a late moment when we witness a potentially career-ending (life-ending, even) injury, yet only when the frame widens do we realize how few people were even there to see it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The snag is in the storytelling. It\u2019s easy to see what drew Durkin, a lifelong wrestling fan, to the stranger-than-fiction tale of the Von Erich curse. But once the bough breaks at the halfway mark, there\u2019s so much<\/em> tragedy that it diffuses any real dramatic tension. We\u2019re just waiting for more bad things to happen; the necessary compression of events into a feature film\u2019s length means that that\u2019s all there\u2019s time<\/em> for. These incredibly dramatic lives become, oddly enough, undramatic cinema \u2014 because there\u2019s no sense of surprise, just doomed inevitability. (In Durkin\u2019s defense, it could have been worse; there was another brother who was omitted from this telling, whose life was yet another series of tragedies.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhy is this happening to us?\u201d Kevin asks. \u201cWhy does it keep happening?\u201d He\u2019s right to ask, but by the end, the viewer may feel the same. Efron\u2019s performance is a bit of a mixed bag; he compellingly and convincingly embodies the constant melancholy of the also-ran, the passed-over, the \u201cgood sport,\u201d but when the time comes to do the heavy lifting at the end (literally, at one point) he just doesn\u2019t quite have the chops. Efron is a divine presence in light comedies, and the world needs those too \u2014 it\u2019s our loss that he\u2019s decided he has to be a Serious Actor. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Durkin\u2019s affection for this world is abundant. He\u2019s clearly obsessed with all the ephemera, the broadcast bumpers and the like, the details of the \u201cdramatic\u201d piece of the TV wrestling puzzle, and those scenes have a loony authenticity of their own. Everyone in the cast gets at least one moment to shine; the one that will stick with me is an image of Tierney in the mirror, a tiny moment of losing her composure, only fleetingly. And Durkin takes a big unlikely swing in the coda that somehow lands, and could have decimated the entire picture if it hadn\u2019t. But The Iron Claw<\/em>\u2019s considerable strengths just aren\u2019t enough to paper over its fatal flaws. It\u2019s an abundance of affecting moments that never quite cohere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “The Iron Claw” is in theaters everywhere Friday. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/iron-claw2-1024x576.png\")
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