Twice is the charm for director Ron Howard and star Russell Crowe.  Cinderella Man brings these two great talents for another shot (no pun intended) at Oscar gold, despite the distinct disadvantage of being a June release.  All of them have already won Oscars – Best Director and Best Picture for Howard in A Beautiful Mind, Best Actor for Crowe in Gladiator, Best Supporting Actress for co-star Renee Zellweger in Cold Mountain, and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman for A Beautiful Mind – and given the Academy’s practice of spreading the wealth in rewarding past nominees that have been looked over, it’s unlikely that Cinderella Man will repeat the success of A Beautiful Mind.

A good boxing drama has to have boxing: the setup, the build-up and the match itself.  A great boxing epic is not all about boxing but is also about personal struggles outside the ring.  The challenge in the ring is matched if not surpassed by greater challenges outside the ring.  Rocky could have been only about boxing but it would not been a Best Picture winner.  Instead, boxing becomes an invisible platform for a love story between two unlikely people, one of whom happens to be an unranked, underdog boxer who gets a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to become World Heavyweight champion.  Million Dollar Baby has a similar boxing platform for a father-daughter type love story between a boxing trainer and his protégé.

For Cinderella Man, the subject of personal struggles is the Great Depression.  The film opens with James Jay Braddock at his physical and financial prime in 1929, and quickly dissolves four years later during the Depression to living in destitution.  Their beautiful house becomes a dilapidated apartment in the basement.  Braddock nurses a broken hand that spoils the match, causing his license to be suspended, and him (along with wife and kids) struggling to make ends meet.  Getting a job is hard, as Braddock finds out when he is not selected to work at the docks.  Pinching pennies is harder.  When bills are not paid, utilities are cut off, Braddock’s children do not have adequate protection from cold.  They get sick easily and have to be sent away.  The scene where Braddock begs for money – to pay for the utilities and bring his kids back – from the boxing promoters and managers is a sad moment that shows the level of degradation he has sunk to.

How Braddock becomes the beacon of hope for the working class people is not elaborated.  It is merely mentioned and thereafter is the staple to build up his ‘Cinderella Man’ angle for the heavyweight title fight with Max Baer.  Although there are some visual cues – being spotted at the welfare office, being recognized while working at the docks, the ensemble of bystanders wishing him well as he leaves for his title fight – they look tacked on.  Casting Max Baer as the cocky, arrogant opponent does not hurt either, and emphasizing his record of having killed two opponents in the ring adds to the image.  But in the process, his humanity is lost and he comes off as a cardboard villain from an action film.

What sells Braddock’s character is not the film’s tagline of a boxing icon, but the relational factor as father, husband and common man.  Crowe delves deeply into Braddock’s emotions and psyche, and so makes the Cinderella Man come alive with full dimensions of character and personality.  Howard’s accommodates by coloring Braddock’s exterior and surrounding so that he draws sympathy no matter what he does (or says).  Though not as astonishing as his work in The Insider or A Beautiful Mind, Crowe’s performance is still solid.

Braddock’s wife Mae is plain.  By that I don’t mean her character but the writing of her character.  She is the archetype housewife you see in movies made or set during the 1930’s.  Aside from being longsuffering, Akiva Goldsman’s female characters are uninteresting.  One can say that Goldman may not have a handle on Alicia Nash’s foreign ethnicity (she is El Salvadoran) in A Beautiful Mind and thus takes it out.  But with Cinderella Man, the pattern of plain Jane characterization is clear.  What gives Mae her spunk is Renee Zellweger’s acting.  Like Jennifer Connelly for Alicia Nash in A Beautiful Mind, Zellweger fills in Mae’s personality, behavior and character that Goldsman either couldn’t or wouldn’t work into, and does it wonderfully.

Outside his family, Braddock’s foremost member in his circle of life is trainer Joe Gould.  Played by Paul Giamatti, Gould provides some light comedic moments in the somber film.  At the docks, Braddock befriends his similarly destitute co-worker Milke Wilson (Paddy Considine).  Boxing promoter Jimmy Johnston (Bruce McGill) first takes away Braddock’s license, then reinstates it and later cautions Braddock against fighting Max Baer, all because of money.  He is concerned that Braddock’s death would cost him a substantial payload of dollars.  Although Craig Bierko nails the arrogance of heavyweight Champion May Baer, his acting is superficial. It is like watching bad acting of the cardboard villain in an action film.

For the boxing sequences, Howard borrows heavily from Scorsese’s flashy, rapid cuts of Raging Bull.  However, he does not try to make them his own and that results in them looking conspicuously Scorsese-ish…imitation rather than homage.  But for their intents and purposes, they prove effective in involving the viewer to root for Braddock when he fights the #2 contender and subsequently Max Baer.  Thomas Newman’s Irish-flavored music score is well-written though sounds somewhat cliché.  It conjures up images of The Road to Perdition, which like Cinderella Man centers around an Irish protagonist.