I’ll admit I didn’t know the story of boxer Christy Salters, who was known for most of her professional life as Christy Martin, but I felt incredibly grateful that a few days before I watched the new movie about her, I saw the woman herself on TV sitting with actor Sydney Sweeney at a Dodgers game. Because I knew that whatever was going to happen in the film, Salters was still alive and kicking.
There’s an uncomfortable undercurrent running throughout the movie, even as we hit the expected sports biopic beats as Salters sort of falls into boxing as a teenager, realizes she’s really good at hitting people, and eventually becomes one of the premiere fighters in professional women’s boxing before the whole thing gets almost nauseatingly dreadful. Sweeney plays Salters as her story begins in 1989 when she wins a few hundred dollars in a boxing match she entered on a lark, after which she gets hooked up with a trainer named Jim Martin, who takes her on and then gets his tendrils into her, finding ways to exert more and more control over her life, including marrying her despite being 25 years older than she is. And the film’s feeling of dread is largely due to Martin, played by a dead-eyed Ben Foster who seems here to have perfected a look and a walk that suggests a constant state of arrogant constipation. Sweeney is quite good, as initially we can see a kind of surprised joy on her face when she actually wins her bouts, and later we can see how her circumstances have bred mostly rage, which she takes out on her opponents. She wields sexuality as a weapon against her rivals, accusing them of being lesbians even as we know she, herself, is gay. And she becomes yet another story of an extraordinary and successful woman who’s exploited by a petty tyrant of a man who subtly holds her back while pretending to move her forward. By the time Salters goes through hell and comes back, we’re exhausted and she’s exhausted, but we also see the woman finally becoming who she’s meant to be, and there’s not much that’s more inspiring in any story than that.
The movie is propelled by exciting boxing scenes that are well conceived by director David Michôd—they feel tactile and immediate, but he only shows quick pieces of each match so that we aren’t able to spend much time noticing we’re watching a movie version of boxing and not the real thing. We do have some large gaps in time as we jump from 1997 to 2003, and then again to 2010, and we wonder if filling in some of those holes might help us to see better how Salters slowly slides into the position she’s in when everything falls apart, but at 135 minutes, we can also understand why the movie isn’t longer. And while Sweeney commands our attention, and Foster repulses us, it’s Merrit Wever, as Christy’s mother, who is maybe the film’s most horrifying character. The actor is often quietly sweet on screen, but here that’s turned into a method of destruction, as she’s continually responsible both for crushing Salters as a human being and for turning a blind eye to everything that’s happening with Jim Martin. That she does it with such a soft voice is just another representation of the insidious cruelty Christy Salters had to overcome. And did.
Christy is in theaters.
