The tragicomic spectacle of American wrestling, with all its poignant pantomime machismo and showbiz fury, is the subject of Sean Durkin’s deeply sad, odd true-life drama based on the case of the Von Erich family – like the Von Trapp family, only with a ’roid rage death wish.
The Von Erichs were a professional wrestling dynasty from Texas in the 1980s; giant boys in wrestling boots and trunks and their taskmaster patriarch-manager. The old man was embittered and fanatically energised on his sons’ behalf in time-honoured fashion by his own failure to win glory as a young contender. As a result of his brutally dysfunctional parenting and toxic masculinity, the Von Erichs were plagued by a succession of heartbreaking calamities. Maybe this film will come to be shown as a double bill with Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides, although the ordeal here is broadly factual.
At its centre is Zac Efron, playing Kevin Von Erich, the dynasty’s oldest wrestler-son. Efron’s physical appearance in this film is quite extraordinary. The elfin boy we knew from High School Musical is gone; that was evidently his Bruce Banner phase. Now he has bulked up to a staggering degree and his whole face and head have changed into a more lantern-jawed look, like the love-child of David Hasselhoff and Desperate Dan. (Efron has explained it is the result of surgery following a freak accident.) Jeremy Allen White is his brother Kerry, a frustrated Olympic athlete in the discus event; Harris Dickinson is David and Stanley Simons is Mike, who really wants to be a musician. Maura Tierney plays their tense mother Doris, who doesn’t want to talk to her sons about any emotional difficulty, and Holt McCallany plays their glowering, crewcut dad Fritz who, while a wrestler, invented a hold called the Iron Claw, the hand clamping on the opponent’s skull in a fearsome grip. He does it on the boys to toughen them up.
The boy who wants to please his dad the most is Kevin, who is never quite good enough. Kevin in fact only finds happiness with his future wife Pam (Lily James) who asks him on their first date about the elephant in the living room. Isn’t wrestling fake? It is tellingly a female role to question this very male world so tactlessly and fundamentally. But Kevin replies there’s nothing fake about it. Wrestlers are rewarded by the NWA, or National Wrestling Alliance, for their skill and technique and also their box office charisma. But it’s clear that their moves in the ring are a question of improvising within a broadly pre-arranged narrative.
Durkin shows us that the unreality is offset by the very real agony of the Von Erichs’ experience: the punishing training, the accidents, the wrenching need to please a father who will never quite love you, the injuries and the fatalities. The family are Christians and there is a repeated, wan close up of a crucifix in the family home, which reminded me of the Roland Barthes essay The World of Wrestling, in which he recalls hearing a fan shout as a wrestler is spreadeagled in agony: “He is dead, little Jesus, there, on the cross.” In this film it perhaps isn’t clear what the sacrifices have been for, and Durkin is sufficiently loyal to wrestling and its fanbase not to question it; however there is a muscular force here and the sentimental postmortem scene is inspired.
• The Iron Claw is released on 9 February in UK and Irish cinemas and is already out in US and Australian cinemas.
