The prevalence of boxing in the sports movie canon has always been peculiar. The firm individualism of the sport makes it an easier fit for dramatic structure, but all of the more complex themes of team-based movies (cooperation, mutual understanding, etc.) are left aside to follow the underdog struggles and self-immolations of isolated men. In Chuck, the story of the “real Rocky” Chuck Wepner, director Philippe Falardeau has the chance to explore both of the poles of the typical boxer arc. Wepner came to fame by lasting until the final seconds of a bout with Muhammad Ali, inspiring Sylvester Stallone and turning the boxer into a local hero. As Falardeau’s film shows, this brief dalliance with fame was both Wepner’s crowning moment and the beginning of a steep decline.
The film emerges in glossy polyester, like a couch wrapped in plastic. It’s the lower-middle class world of Chuck (Liev Schreiber), all bad suits that crinkle when someone moves and tacky decor. He’s obviously a desperate social climber from the outset, to the extent that we don’t meet Chuck so much as he comes up and introduces himself, detailing his life and personality as he describes his early days as a boxer. Nicknamed the Bayonne Bleeder for how easily his face busted open in fights, Chuck wields a boxing style that tends to let his enemies use his face as a punching bag before he eventually lays in (hopefully) enough hits during rest periods to come out on top. This ill-advised, ill-trained approach may explain how even though we meet Chuck before his rise to fame, he already looks broken down: hair thinning, face worn, body language tired. Hell, in the ring, his manager, Al (Ron Perlman), looks tougher than the fighter himself, or at least less likely to take the kind of abuse Chuck does.
But if Chuck inspired Rocky Balboa, he has more in common with Jake LaMotta, or maybe even a version of LaMotta crossed with Rupert Pupkin. He sees boxing as a way to be visible to people, to entertain, and by and large he has a gregarious personality that clashes with the usual depictions of violent, taciturn fighters. In the ring, he looks out of place, like an audience member who enthusiastically volunteered to get on stage before realizing what he’d done. In one fight, he withstands blow after blow until he finally gets a few solid hits in and looks more surprised about it than anyone else in the building. Nonetheless, he does have a great respect for the sport, as seen when he corrects Al on how to pronounce the name of Muhammad Ali (Pooch Hall), not out of any liberal sense so much as his reverence for a truly great fighter.
The Ali fight happens relatively early in the film, and it is pitched more as a filler fight for The Greatest than a chance for Chuck to prove himself. Even the match itself, in which Chuck defies all the odds and manages to last until the final 20 seconds of the fight, is a muted affair, countering most cinematic depictions of Ali’s cunning to instead focus on Chuck’s perpetual disbelief that this fight is even happening, much less that he manages to last. For the most crucial aspect to Chuck isn’t the result of the bout but that he was a part of it, and the remainder of the film tracks the slow dwindling of his fame. Much of it flits between scenes in bars, discotheques and even the occasional meeting with Stallone (Morgan Spector), who treats Chuck much the way one might a well-meaning but exasperating uncle. Schreiber is never better than in Chuck’s scenes with Stallone, imbuing the boxer with a pathetic supplication even as he attempts to guilt the young actor into throwing him some kind of support, even the mere validation of his approval.
For Chuck to live out his years in the shadow of Rocky adds a fascinating, postmodern wrinkle to the boxing movie, one that provides the film with its juiciest scenes. When Chuck first sees the film, he sits in awe as his life is projected back at him but cleaner, with a noble drama instead of the farce of his domestic life (Elisabeth Moss plays her most perfunctory role in years as Chuck’s jilted first wife). Later, he drifts in and out of an odd belief that he is a part of the film itself, reporting on its box office to friends like a satisfied producer and cheering for each Oscar it receives at the following year’s ceremony. It is in this back half that the film finally begins to elevate from its hackneyed first 45 minutes, with its clichéd tropes and generic marital strife. But this falling action also suggests that this should have been a comedy instead of a muted drama, one more attuned to the absurdity of Chuck’s secondhand fame. Chuck only understands this about itself at the end, when a Planet Hollywood statue of Rocky emerges as a final, mocking tribute to the fighter’s small-time ambitions and cartoonish self-regard, a tribute to the money that everyone but him made on his life.
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