The family is a cult and the cult a family in the films of Sean Durkin. After Martha Marcy May Marlene and The Nest, The Iron Claw continues Durkin’s excavations with a biopic of the Von Erichs, a famous wrestling clan whittled away by a tragic curse.
After a quick black-and-white preamble sketching paterfamilias Fritz’s own career as a fighter who failed to win the big prizes, Durkin goes curtain-up on the era of the retired fighter’s sons, the sun-kissed 1970s and beyond. Fritz, now a ballsy uncompromising martinet of the old school, is in charge of training his boys and of the wrestling franchise they fight in.
By this point the family curse has already struck. Fritz (Holt McCallany) and wife Doris (Maura Tierney) have lost a child in infancy, which means Kevin (Zac Efron) is now the oldest child, a natural, you’d have thought, for a crack at the title all Fritz’s boys have been raised to win.
But Kevin is not the favoured son and dad makes no bones about who is – David (Harris Dickinson), and after that Kerry (Jeremy Allen White). And after Kerry, Mike (Stanley Simons), who’d rather be a musician than a wrestler. But none of the boys in this true story are masters of their own destiny, their father is. Or rather fate is, since one after the other each more-favoured child is put out of action by accident or design, until Kevin is the last man standing and the ony son left who can fulfil dad’s plan.
According to Fritz there are unseen forces ranged against this him. He’s given to dark muttering about “those rat bastards” who plot to hold his family back, that’s when fate and the family curse isn’t doing the bastards’ work for them. Durkin builds an argument on the quiet that Fritz’s conspiracy theorising and his attachment to metaphysical explanation for his family’s woes is rooted in his own pathology. Fritz might be ballsy, Durkin suggests, but underneath the compelling presence lurks a weak man. The arc of Durking’s film isn’t so much for one of the boys to seize the winner’s belt as to stand up to dad and get this obstruction out of the road.
You’ve probably seen pictures of Efron’s massive, rock-hard body in the publicity for this movie. Underdog Kevin has something to prove to his father and the rest of the family and Efron makes that statement for him with a physique that looks like steroid abuse given a coat of teak yacht varnish. He’s also prosthetically tweaked with a prognathous jaw that makes him look more like the Hulk in the Lou Ferrigno era (which was the 1970s). Harris Dickinson is also generally speaking pretty buff – you might have seen him flaunting the six pack in Triangle of Sadness. It’s a 12 pack here. Biggest surprise, if you remember him most as the driven chef in The Bear is Jeremy Allen White, who here has actual muscles and throws himself around the ring with the best of them.
Most ring-based movies seem in the end to be psychological dramas (going at least as far back as 1931’s The Champ, starring Wallace Beery) but they generally get rated on how good the fights are. The Iron Claw’s are pretty good. Durkin shot them in long takes in front of an invited crowd and has his cameras up in the faces of the Erichs. The one between Kevin and peroxide motormouth Ric Flair (Aaron Dean Eisenberg catapulting himself up the acting seeding here) is particularly well done – ie visceral.
There is a lot of good acting. Efron is transformed, utterly, as the dim but decent Kevin, a world away from all those pretty-boy roles half-winking to the camera. Holt McCallany as patriarch Fritz is also remarkably good. They all are – Dickinson, White, Tierney. This is a great cast. In spite of not having made that many actual films, Durkin has the sort of reputation that can pull in pretty much whoever he wants.
Lily James was also great, early on, as the very forward young woman who decides that Kevin is for her and steamrollers him into a relationship. Later she’s slightly left behind by the evolving Oedipal drama.
At 132 minutes it’s simply too long, and in that time you’d have thought that a few of the placeholder characters could have been fleshed out a bit. These include, oddly, Kevin himself – a gentle soul whose simple nature renders as a blank page. Impressive as he, his brothers and the rest of the movie looks, its punch doesn’t connect the way it should.
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
