The Fire Inside
AMAZON
After entering the world of directing by helming the second episode of The Mandalorian – Season 3, cinematographer Rachel Morrison makes the jump to feature filmmaking by bringing to life the story of Claressa “T-Rex” Shields in The Fire Inside. With a screenplay written by Barry Jenkins, the movie closely follows the structure adopted by filmmakers Zackary Canepari and Drea Cooper in their 2016 documentary T-Rex, which tracked Shields’ journey to the 2012 London Olympics as the first-ever female boxer to win an Olympic gold medal, at only 17 years of age.
She achieved the same success in Rio four years later, but the film's most interesting part has nothing to do with boxing. Instead, it happened after her win, which should’ve theoretically propelled her to superstardom away from Flint, Michigan, and gave her the endorsements she needed to provide for her family. However, those endorsements never came. It arrived for so many Olympic stars who broke records, but none for Shields, who made history when the sport of female boxing was introduced during the 2012 games. Ryan Destiny portrays Shields in the film and imbues the character with the same fierceness captured in T-Rex, either when she prepares for the biggest competition of her life with coach Jason Crutchfield (Brian Tyree Henry) or in the aftermath of the Olympics.
But unlike T-Rex, which captures Shields’ journey with an interested eye (even though it doesn’t go as deep enough as it should), Jenkins’ script doesn’t seem at all compelled to draw a complete portrait of who this athlete is beyond her enjoyment of “beating people up” and how she expected the world to change when winning the gold medal. In the first half, the movie follows rudimentary sports biopic clichés: the impoverished, abusive parental figure doesn’t give the love and/or support Shields should have, her coach acts as a quasi “father figure” (though it’s nearly not as developed as in T-Rex), and the audience tracks her first soul-crushing loss during the Olympic qualifiers in China. Of course, this is only emotional fodder, so the audience cries when she eventually overcomes her challenges and wins the coveted medal.
These scenes are interspersed with lots of high-spirited melodrama that could’ve been fascinating to watch. However, they’re all plagued by recycled dialogues that do little to peer into the protagonist’s interiority. In fact, one who watches T-Rex and The Fire Inside back-to-back (as this critic did) will notice how Canepari and Cooper can make us understand just a bit more about Shields by filming close to her, such as when the win she scores in a competition isn’t as high as she wanted it to.
This is how the documentary opens. The “bubble” she created with Crutchfield in the gym has been popped, even if she won and has secured her spot in China. Once there, she gets a good dose of reality when Savannah Marshall defeats her in the qualifying march. Shields still had enough points to get into the Olympics, but her loss reads like a personal tragedy. She’s never lost and always had Jason by his side (who could not travel, per USA Boxing rules). What happens when all of her expectations are literally and figuratively shattered? Her resolve grows much stronger than it did, and she successfully beats all of the physical and psychological enemies to accomplish what was once thought impossible.
Morrison and Jenkins recreate those scenes in The Fire Inside but with little to no emotional complexity on what her first loss and eventual win means for her. Of course, many will entirely blame Jenkins’ clichéd and mawkish script, but he isn’t at fault for how flimsily directed and blandly shot this entire movie is. Images have little to no meaning behind Jenkins’ fragmented story structure (unlike how James Mangold and Jay Cocks centered their fractured narrative around a lingering, persistent question in A Complete Unknown, another Christmas Day-released biopic), the boxing matches are captured with the energy of a bad television film, and the clichés are never transcended, or appropriated well-enough.
It's also bad when Amazon released another ‘inspiring’ sports biopic just a few weeks ago from (instead of a cinematographer-turned-director) an editor-turned-director in William Goldenberg’s Unstoppable. While it contains most of the tropes outlined in The Fire Inside, Goldenberg (and cinematographer Salvatore Totino) capture harrowing wrestling matches with an electrifying intensity, while the humanist turns from Jharrel Jerome, Jennifer Lopez, and Don Cheadle give the emotional texture needed for us to ignore most of the film’s clichés.
Destiny and Tyree Henry are both excellent in The Fire Inside, but they pale in comparison to the athlete/coach relationship Goldenberg drew between Jerome’s Anthony Robles and Cheadle’s Sean Charles in Unstoppable. Sure, it had moments where it couldn’t surpass its tiresome sports movie platitudes, but it more than made up for its screenwriting inconsistencies with some genuinely incredible wrestling sequences. In Morrison’s lens, the boxing scenes in The Fire Inside feel lethargic and removed from any form of introspection with Shields, which the audience never gets a chance to latch onto in any of the movie’s sections.
It's only when The Fire Inside cuts to “six months later,” after Shields wins her gold mdeal, that the film begins to ask questions on what the symbol of a gold medal means and show the ridiculous double-standard advertising executives have at giving athletes like Michael Phelps the world, but nothing for Shields, who has set even more significant records than him in 2012. In one such scene, Shields is forced to go to the grocery store and sees a box of Wheaties with Phelps’ face on it while she is still scraping by to give her now-disabled mother a comfortable life.
The contrast is staggering and infuriating. A white male athlete, who, just four years ago, was embroiled in a series of controversies related to a photo of himself smoking a bong, is still getting the world, while Shields doesn’t even get a fraction of that success. It’s the most intelligent scene in Jenkins’ screenplay, and and Morrison captures this heart-wrenching realization that nothing has significantly improved for Shields with a close proximity to the character that should’ve been there since the very beginning.
However, it isn’t enough to salvage The Fire Inside from being nothing more than another run-of-the-mill, dull sports drama with little to no interest in the people they are depicting, regardless of the impassioned performances Destiny and Tyree Henry give as Shields and Crutchfield. If one wants to learn and get a better sense of who these people are, Canepari and Cooper’s underseen documentary is right there. It gets the job done in much less time than The Fire Inside and asks all of us to remember who Claressa Shields is as an athlete and human being.