| Patrick Clifford |
Requiem for a Heavyweight plays on glorious 35mm at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, August 29th, through Sunday, August 31st. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
Requiem for a Heavyweight is a tightly scripted, expertly acted film that centers around the career-ending knockout of a boxer. It is worth noting that a requiem is defined as a service or composition in honor of the dead.
The film opens by putting us in the POV of the titular boxer as he experiences this deadly knockout. We feel the disorienting haze of the spotlit ring. The blur of punches. We hear the weight of the blows we are taking. The joyful cheers of the mob encouraging our fate. The countdown to the ding of the bell signaling our defeat. We continue to stay with the boxer’s POV as we take his walk of shame to the locker room. Horrified onlookers do not hide their disapproval or their scorn as the shot leads us to a mirror where we finally get a look at ourselves. Bloodied, puffy, and beaten. We are not dead, but a part of us definitely is.
I love that we get this perspective. That we are forced to feel what it’s like to get knocked out. Because I think we all do. Eventually. I think Requiem for a Heavyweight is in many ways a story about the price of getting old, and the humility it comes with.
I am 56 years old. And I’m ashamed to say it. I don’t feel shame for being 56, just in announcing it. My hearing isn’t great. My eyesight noticeably worse. Standing up is an action often paired with grunts. But the shame comes from the outside world and how it perceives me. Or how it chooses to ignore me. To be clear, I’m not trying to unleash 56 years of self-pity upon the fine readers of Perisphere. This is just one Gen Xer’s opinion of what happens in society. To everyone. And it happens fast. In a blur. Suddenly you are not a viable candidate for full-time employment. You are not generally noticed, nor considered to have any serious hope for impact on the future. Instead, you become a prime target for holding on to the past. For continuing to contribute to the greater good by attempting to reclaim the all-important virtues of youth. For some reason, I am now seen as someone in desperate need of flatter abs and stronger erections. Getting older can be humiliating.
The boxer’s name in Requiem for a Heavyweight is Louis “The Mountain” Rivera and shortly after being knocked out, he is told that his boxing career is over. What he learns over the course of the film, is that his career became his identity. Not just to the outside world, but to himself as well. He has to learn what’s on the other side of the mountain.
One of the first places Louis goes in this search is the employment office. His application form is as blank as his mind as to what his past meant and what his future holds. It’s a superbly written scene between Louis and the employment officer, who is aptly named Grace. In their interaction, we see how Louis thinks of himself, and how others have shaped this picture for him. Initially, Louis is reluctant to admit that all he’s been doing for the last 17 years is fighting. Grace coaxes him to reframe this history. She wants him to find pride in his past. “You’re a professional prize fighter? That sounds like interesting work Mister Rivera.” To which Louis replies, “Well, it’s a living.” His life may have been interesting for other people, but to him it was a fight for survival. As their conversation continues, Grace learns that Louis can no longer fight because he has been medically certified as incapable of doing so. He has been punched too many times. She genuinely feels for him and tries to offer a path forward by relaying her previous experience helping disabled veterans. “You’d be surprised at the openings that come up for people with special problems.” Louis responds, “Miss, I got no special problem. To you, I’m a big ugly slob and I look like a freak, but I was almost the heavyweight champion of the world. Mountain Rivera was ALMOST heavyweight champion of the world.” For Louis, his identity is rooted in what he almost achieved, and the cost written all over his face.
As Louis seeks his future, Requiem for a Heavyweight offers him two distinctly different paths forward. The first comes through Grace, who believes Louis would make a fine youth camp counselor. She believes not only in his athletic prowess and achievements, but in his heart and his ability to make good. She wants to introduce Louis to the youth camp’s director. Grace approaches Louis on his turf, in an ex-boxer’s club masquerading as a bar filled with smashed noses, swollen sockets, and cauliflowered ears. It’s another great character-revealing scene in which Grace shows Louis what love possibly feels like. He is walking on eggshells. He feels like singing. Grace has given Louis the ability to see what’s underneath the fighter. To see who he truly is in his own eyes, and not who he almost was in others. In parting, Louis asks Grace not to build him up too much to the camp director. “Tell him I had a hundred-eleven fights, and I never took a dive. And I’m kinda proud of that.”
The other path forward for Louis goes through characters from an entirely different camp. People who need Louis to take even more punches. This path is being paved by Maish Rennick, Louis’s lifelong manager. In that lifetime, Maish has managed to make Louis believe he is his best friend. In reality, Maish has used Louis as his cash cow by milking the fantasy of almost a champion for every penny that could be punched. To make matters worse, Maish bet against Louis’s strength of heart in his final bout and now needs to pay loan sharks back for his poor appraisal. To do so, he asks Louis to sink even lower. He asks him to become a professional wrestler. To not only become a freak, but to intentionally take a dive as Louis makes his way there. Maish believes Louis is an ape who chases ghosts. He believes Louis is stuck in the past, and that he belongs there. Louis will prove Maish to be a poor judge of character one more time.
Even after Louis finds out that Maish bet against him. Even after Louis discovers Maish needs him to sacrifice more blood and more dignity. Even then, Louis finds a future where he can embrace the truth of who he is. In the final scene, we are back in his POV. He is once again taking a walk of shame. But this walk is a choice. Into the ring and into the next stage of his life. Louis has chosen to help his best friend out. Despite what Maish has done. Despite what people may think. At least he knows what shame really is moving forward. Getting older isn’t always humiliating. For there is beauty in truth, and it may even last a lifetime.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon