As Barry Jenkins was working on Mufasa for Disney, a script that he wrote years ago in the aftermath of Moonlight was being turned into a movie of its own. At the time that he started writing a film based on the life of Olympic boxer Claressa Shields, it was believed he would also direct it as well, potentially as his project after If Beale Street Could Talk. I’m not going to blame Mufasa though for him not getting to do it -because it in fact found another director before the 2019 Lion King even came out: Rachel Morrison, the cinematographer for Ryan Coogler, making her own directing debut. The movie still went through a series of false starts over the last several years, due to nearly being shunted to development hell, then delayed by COVID, then the studio dropping it. But like Shields herself, Morrison and Jenkins persisted in spite of these punches and finally managed to get the film off the ground. A fitting underdog story of its own to match the one it was telling.
And The Fire Inside is indeed quite an underdog story if rather typically so -the journey of a teenage boxer from the suburbs of Flint, Michigan (before the city became an internationally infamous symbol of public health mismanagement and ambivalence) all the way to the 2012 London Olympics. Claressa Shields, played by Ryan Destiny, joins an amateur boxing group coached by Brian Tyree Henry’s Jason Crutchfield, quickly proves to be the best in the class and makes her way gradually to the qualifying try-outs, first in China then in London. All at the same time she is dealing with abuses at home and the more ordinary aspects of being a teenager, including her relationship with a fellow boxing student.
Probably the most interesting artistic choice that Morrison brings to her first movie is her conscious evading of the grandiosity of the Olympics. There are no scenes of ceremony or crowds of spectators or scale of any kind. What we do see of Claressa’s Olympic journey is mostly limited to intimate and contained scenes in the ring, dark and empty backstage corridors, and small hotel rooms with perhaps a nice view. And it all relates back to the humble origins and gritty aesthetics of her home -I’ve never seen a movie about an Olympic athlete’s journey that spends this much time in suburban homes or tiny local gyms or vacant Midwestern streets on the edge of town. The movie is about Flint as much as it is about Claressa and the unlikelihood of a place like that producing someone destined for such a great trajectory. Jason even uses the city’s history and flint itself as a metaphor to give Claressa a sense of identity distinct from any other competitor.
Unfortunately, the movie can’t claim the same level of distinctness. Jenkins’s script is quite solid, the characters neatly formed and authentic, but the story itself is very broadly conventional, the stakes as predictable as they come, and though Morrison certainly makes choices, her direction is by and large fairly mundane. Its most obvious precedent is of course Million Dollar Baby, with its similar scrappy aesthetics and headstrong underdog heroine, though it lacks both in drive and heart -perhaps hamstrung a bit by its biographical fidelity. More interesting than a lot of the boxing stuff is Claressa’s personal life, but her family trauma is mostly explored in reference while her romance with Lil’ Zay (Idrissa Sanogo) is treated with more significance. But their scenes -making out at the bowling alley, attending high school grad together, him chasing her bus as she leaves town- feel resonant. They are moments that successfully convey Claressa’s life as more tangible than other movie athletes.
Destiny is also very good at playing this groundedness, and the attraction to toughness in her character -who subtextually finds in boxing an outlet for the rage at her conditions and traumas. At the same time, she channels the ordinary teenage emotions and vulnerabilities of the character in her mood and body language -strikingly so for an actress pushing thirty. Henry is also predictably good, if the part is pretty meagre. His suburban origin is his principal feature of distinction, and nothing else it seems would fit Henry in this archetype. But he does play that archetype pretty moderately.
And there's no way around the artificiality that springs out of this, whether in the conflict between Claressa and Jason or the rise in Claressa's profile. She loses a major fight early on, but her record from the Olympics on, where we are informed she has not lost a single match, it's difficult to build tension around, and the movie loses a good chunk of momentum. It also doesn't help that the fights themselves are shown sparingly and without any kind of dynamic approach to how they're shot and edited -certainly when compared to a recent boxing movie like Creed III- which is disappointing coming from a cinematographer. It is somewhat subversive that the movie is built more around Claressa's own drama than any particular fight in the arena, but it does make for a boxing movie where the boxing could almost be arbitrary. Claressa earns the nickname "T-Rex" and we hardly know why -her career seems to scoot under the radar. In the hands of a stronger director, that would not matter, we've seen it work before. Morrison can't however grasp a dramatic efficacy in her story in spite of its more earnest virtues. By the end, the film has become rather drab, and even Jenkins's script not entirely unbeholden to cliché.
The Fire Inside is a title that promises more than the movie itself can deliver on. That rage doesn't come to the surface in Claressa all that much, her demeanour through her real-life frustrations more brooding. And maybe that is how the real Shields would prefer her substantial legacy be represented. As a film though it doesn't amount to a lot. Jenkins and Morrison had some good instincts here, and Destiny proved capable of rising to the challenge physically and on some level psychologically. But there is no knock-out punch, it is not a movie as tough, strong, or versatile as its subject.
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