One issue the movies should have cleared up for us by the time 2026 comes around: whether or not the Safdies would, like the altogether more proven Coen brothers, be better off pooling their talents (in their case, for cinematic agitation) rather than working apart. Josh Safdie, perhaps the Ethan of the two, has gone off to make the Timmy Caramel ping-pong opus Marty Supreme, set for release over Christmas; Benny, whose on-camera appearances arguably position him as the pair's Joel, beats his brother into cinemas with The Smashing Machine, a film that arrives with the look of a shameless awards shot, in that it sticks a now all-but-unrecognisable Dwayne Johnson under latex as MMA pioneer Mark Kerr. Dig a little deeper, however, and the new film suggests its own form of continuity with Safdie projects past. It's most obvious in the naturalism of its performances: Johnson and his co-stars, who include Emily Blunt and actual MMA combatants past and present, have clearly been directed to kick these scenes around, to mess them up, as Kerr did his opponents in the ring. But it's also there on a thematic level: once more, a Safdie sibling returns to that great American subject of compulsion. 2014's Heaven Knows What centred a lovelorn heroin addict; 2019's Uncut Gems was driven by the Sandler character's obsessive, doomed sports betting. Kerr, himself hooked on opioids as a means of pain relief, was a man primarily addicted to bashing in other men's heads and bodies (albeit for sport). Those earlier films were tragedies because, for their protagonists, there was no easy way out of the cycle. The Smashing Machine is notionally more accommodating - more mainstream - not just because of the Johnson factor, but because Kerr, by this point in his thirties, was forced to adapt and change after a run of defeats.
Even so, the surprise for most viewers will be how dramatically shrugging the new film is. Kerr is a gentle giant from the off: playful around wife Dawn (Blunt), courtly to an old dear he encounters in a doctor's waiting room, respectful to his fellow travellers aboard a longhaul flight. With not untypical Safdiean perversity, the filmmaker behind two of the most propulsive and stressful of recent thrillers (Gems and 2017's Good Time) has now landed on material that, for the most part, demonstrates no urgency whatsoever. If you come this way looking for dramatic transformation, you'll likely leave underwhelmed. Someone's put a new face on The Rock's body (prosthetics whizz Kazu Hiro, to give him his due), but you could probably do that with any Action Man or G.I. Joe doll in your collection. His Kerr, you sense, really just needs to give his head a wobble so as to emerge intact, comfortable and on more or less the right side of history. (No Jake LaMotta he, as the real Kerr's cheerily shambling cameo underlines.) It's all a bit minor key, and possibly a bit more minor key than a film billing itself The Smashing Machine ought to be; an air of restlessness hung over the spare Sunday night crowd with whom I caught the film. You can feel it snapping into sharper focus amid the fight sequences, presented as a blinding white stage on which some basic idea of masculinity is performed, often brutally. Outside the ring, however, the movie remains stubbornly sketchy and slight: scenes that play almost like rehearsals for a film rather than any final cut, performers seen casually grasping for a purpose or a plan of action. Safdie is so committed to capturing the moment that any sense of movie superstructure - a plot or an endgame - seems to recede into the middle distance: like Mark Kerr at this point in his career, the film barely knows what to do with itself. That would account for the moderate-to-low receipts The Smashing Machine reportedly took over the weekend: the assumption, doubtless backed up by lukewarm word-of-mouth, was that it's hardly box-office, and maybe not even ring-ready.
Why, then, did I find myself being oddly charmed by it, in a way no previous Safdie endeavour has quite won me over? Partly, it's that haphazard milieu, haphazardly evoked. This was MMA in its early, low-rent days, before it became a billion-dollar industry invited to the White House; Safdie approaches it as a marginal pursuit, shot on low-end video, populated by jobbing warriors, none of whom possessed riches or privilege enough to become a Conor McGregor-level arsehole, sent to the ends of the earth to make a living. (Well, Japan: the script fashions a latent joke out of the established fact these burly muscle-doms were summoned to compete in a annual gathering referred to as Pride.) Mostly, it's that even at its windiest, the film appears to be fumbling towards a new syntax for the careworn sports movie, examining not success, but what it means to find yourself on the skids (as so many Safdie characters have been) and, most importantly of all, what it means to lose. It leads The Smashing Machine into a droll stretch of domestic comedy - all his downtime leaves the K.O.-ed Kerr fussing about his smoothies and cacti, and driving poor Dawn up the wall - and towards a truth less ecstatic than it is very ordinary: some indirect explanation of why so many retired British footballers bought themselves pubs. Even those disappointed by The Smashing Machine will have to admit it's different; the trouble is there will be many who are disappointed. As experimental as anything either Safdie has so far attempted, and possibly too experimental for multiplex purposes, the film remains small and self-contained rather than in any way steroidal. In a break with biopic tradition, an opening title card indicates the film will only cover the years 1997 to 2000; what's interesting about Johnson's performance is that he doesn't try to act through the latex, as so many performers (Oldman in Darkest Hour, DiCaprio in J. Edgar) have. (Here's a man literally trapped within the carapace of his own body, and by what it represents.) You may well find yourself sparring or wrestling with it, as I did: again refusing to make life easy for anyone, not least himself, Safdie has taken material that might have generated an awards-season heavyhitter, tied at least one arm behind its back, and sent out an underdog in its place. Now that's perversity.
The Smashing Machine is now playing in cinemas nationwide.
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