Like every year at this time, there are a ton of new movies out in theaters, but the one that might be most worth your attention is also the one that might be most likely to slip through unnoticed, in amongst all the mustachioed vampires, Nicole Kidman’s psychosexual games, and… well… Bob Dylan.
This one’s called The Fire Inside, and it’s a biopic about Claressa Shields, who, at the age of 17, became the first American woman ever to win a gold medal in boxing at the Olympics. It’s the feature directorial debut for Rachel Morrison, who was, herself, the first woman ever to be nominated for a cinematography Oscar, and it’s written by Barry Jenkins, who won his own Oscar for the screenplay to Moonlight. The movie’s got pedigree, which Claressa Shields decidedly did not when she started training in a gym in a decimated Flint, Michigan, when she was 11 years old. And the film hits a number of the familiar notes as we see her form into the fighter who would squeak into the London Olympics before battling her way onto the gold medal podium.
And then, we realize there’s still 45 minutes left in the movie, and this is what really sets the whole thing apart from other sports crowd-pleasers. We usually end when our hero has won the big contest, but in life, there’s a whole lot that comes after. And we see Shields as she struggles after the endorsements she expected don’t come, as her family life isn’t any better than it was before, and as she realizes the difficulty of gaining the recognition she deserves in a world that still doesn’t take women seriously as athletes. The movie is shot with verve and energy, it’s exciting where it ought to be and contemplative where it needs to be, all which we might expect from a director who’s proven to be so good with a camera. And Brian Tyree Henry, who plays Shields’s coach, shows again that he’s one of the best actors working today. It all adds up to a rousing and empowering movie that reminds us there’s still a whole lot of fighting left to do even after the final bell rings.
