In the inevitable argument over who would win in a
hypothetical fight between Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson, I stump for
Tyson. This has less to do with technical analysis than a lizard brain
recognition of a fighter whose physical strength is fueled by a deeply
ingrained, skinless ferocity—he is simply the most frightening
human being I can contemplate having to face in hand-to-hand
combat.
It makes an odd sense that in James Toback’s disarming new
documentary, Tyson, his subject’s full range of emotion
reverberates as close to the surface as his murderousness did in the
ring. Here Tyson expresses pain with as much honesty as he inflicted
it, with a surprisingly unguarded level of candor and eloquence. It
seems strange the first time Tyson cries on camera, and when he does it
again afterward, you never quite get used to it.
Tyson is something beyond a simple biographical documentary.
Intensely confessional and self-reflective, the idea of the film
languished for years, until the stars aligned for both fighter and
filmmaker to latch onto it as an emotional lifeboat: Tyson had just
crashed his car and landed in rehab for cocaine addiction, while Toback
had just lost his mother, and had, as he delicately puts it, “found
myself doing things that I felt would abbreviate my life.” So they
holed up in a rented Hollywood Hills house and made something
constructive out of their anguish.
It’s unlikely that a documentary about Mike Tyson this revealing
could have been made by another filmmaker, and according to Toback,
Tyson actually turned down a lucrative offer from Werner Herzog. With a
friendship spanning more than 20 years, Toback explains that Tyson
“knew that I wouldn’t ridicule him.”
Indeed, who would dare? In Tyson, the fighter describes his
life’s beginning as an asthmatic, short, fat kid who was often the
subject of ridicule. The anxieties of his childhood, coupled with a
pubescent career in drugs and the juvenile detention system, primed him
through physical and psychological injury to channel his fears, through
boxing’s edifying rigors, into fight. It’s a superhero’s story as much
as it is a Greek tragedy, which is how Tyson himself described it to
Toback after first seeing it—telling him, “I was watching, and
thinking how people think I’m crazy and they’re scared of me. Watching
it, I thought, ‘I’m scared of this guy.'”
Indeed, Tyson hardly glosses over the most threatening chapters of
his life. It’s easy to empathize with his side of the story when he
recalls biting Evander Holyfield’s ears mid-fight after multiple
illegal head butts. Likewise, the betrayal he felt by Robin Givens
during an over-scrutinized, doomed marriage marked by allegations of
domestic abuse. But his denial of having committed rape, despite having
been convicted, is a disquieting thing to swallow alongside intimate
self-descriptions of the animal violence of his sexual appetite.
Such disclosures are delivered in a dizzying almost-prose, relayed
in film through a split-screen technique that brings you right into
Tyson’s eyes and his mouth. It’s an effective device, one that Toback
had toyed with in the past, but was ultimately compelled by the
potential it held to illustrate an icon as complex and fragmented as
Mike Tyson. It was, as he says, much like the union of Tyson with
boxing, of fear with violence, “an urgent connection.”
Looks awesome