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Thursday, 08 July 2004 |
  Tully once had a pretty good career as a boxer. Then he got married and it all went to hell. When things turned sour his wife left him. Figures. Now his money and fame are gone and he exists in a world of seedy bars and transient jobs. People of frustrated ambition and muted lives are his fellow travelers in this world, their only solace booze and big talk. No one is really going anywhere.
Oma is a hopeless alcoholic, a shrill floozy who spins tales of fanciful ex-husbands. When she's not drunk, she's sleeping one off.
Ernie is a wide-eyed kid, an aspiring boxer who spars with Tully one day at the gym. Tully is impressed. This kid has the stuff. He could be champ.
Ernie takes Tully's advice and begins training as a fighter. But his illusions are shattered when he finds that the road to victory is paved more with pain than anything else. Then he gets his girlfriend pregnant and discovers there's more to being a man than being able to use your fists. Meanwhile Tully has begun an affair with Oma. Tully is a man who likes to drink but he's simply outclassed by Oma, whose alcohol-fueled moodswings quickly wear him down. He's also breaking his back working the fields and for the pittance he makes, he may as well get back in the ring. When he does, he's pitted against an opponent as weary as himself and the two old lions pummel each other senseless with neither wanting to admit defeat. Tully quickly realizes he's just too old to claw his way to the top again. And so it goes.
John Huston's Fat City is an elegiac ode to the losers of the world: the kind of people whose existence is justified only by their dreams. Some are the type who'd rather take a drink than take a chance. The rest are like Tully, living on memories of past glory. There are no startling revelations in Fat City; it's a story simply told, with honesty and poignancy.
The underrated Stacy Keach is Tully. Normally radiating a forceful presence, Keach submerges that image and plays Tully as the kind of man you only half-listen to out of pity. Jeff Bridges, in one of his earliest roles, is Ernie, the cocky youth in for a rude awakening and a life of mediocrity. Susan Tyrrell turns in the best performance of the movie as Oma, the once-attractive barfly whose charms are best swallowed with a whiskey chaser.
Leonard Gardner wrote the telling screenplay from his novel while John Huston and cinematographer Conrad Hall beautifully capture the dingy hues of his down and out world. Fat City is one of the best films of the seventies.
"Do you think he was ever young?"
"No."
Starring: Stacy Keach, Jeff Bridges, Susan Tyrrell, Candy Clark, Nicholas Colasanto, Art Aragon.
Director: John Huston
Studio: Columbia Pictures
Rated: PG
Running Time: 100 mins
Year: 1972
Reviewer: Steve Gonzales |
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