Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Cast: Florence Pugh, Nick Frost, Lena Headey, Jack Lowden, Vince Vaughn, Dwayne Johnson, Olivia Bernstone, Leah Harvey, Mohammed Amiri, Jack Gouldbourne, Elroy Powell, Hannah Rae, Julia Davis, Stephen Merchant, Ellie Gonsalves, Aqueela Zoll, Kim Matula, James Burrows, Thea Trinidad.
You must never be afraid to risk losing everything in the pursuit of the one goal you have always held in your heart, the price is extraordinarily high but the reward of satisfaction will always be worth it, even if it eventually takes you down a road to which you might never recover. Too high a price? Too much jeopardy involved? Nobody said it would be easy, nobody ever said it would be an easy fix, but sometimes wrestling with one’s own conscious is worth all and one that is captured with spirit and generosity of scope in the biggest sports arena of all, the ring.
In Stephen Merchant’s Fighting With My Family, what comes rushing out of the corner and holds the audience in the grip of a tight, muscle-locked arm is that the biggest loss in life is that of those who have your back, who are there to be tagged in to the brawl when you are at your lowest and before the ultimate chance to secure your place in history comes your way. The film may concentrate on the life of Saraya Knight, the youngest woman to hold a title at the W.W.E. but at its heart it is about showing that it is no longer acceptable to show history from the top down, that history is written by those extraordinary, ordinary people to whom entertain and give us hope when searching for own best version of ourselves.
The film also places before the audience a very important couple of questions, what gives the greater satisfaction, achieving world-wide fame, or being the local unsung hero that everybody looks up to and relies upon and in a world where we wrongly believe that all the younger generation, the so called millennials are up to no good or have lost direction, regardless of our own personal thoughts on the world of boxing, wrestling and other sports which deal with controlled aggression, would it not be better to have all find a place to be challenged mentally and physically without them having to resort to being put in the firing line of the armed services, or falling into the void, their time occupied by hanging on street corners and attracting bad company?
It is a series of question perhaps that can only be answered by a person’s sense of morality, what they themselves have been through, but just as much as Saraya Knight deserves the attention for what she achieved, so do the rest of the family who supported her in her teenage dream, especially that of Zak Knight, portrayed with a sense of powerful charm by Jack Lowden.
For Florence Pugh, Fighting With My Family is yet another stepping stone to being considered, along with Saoirse Ronan, Tessa Thompson and Jessie Buckley as being four of the remarkable young actors who can command an audience with authority; for Ms. Pugh it is made even more outstanding by the limited amount of time she has actually spent on screen, almost from out of nowhere, she has captivated across the various moments on film. In portraying the wrestler Saraya Knight/Paige she once again fills the screen with her tenacity and presence, whilst all the time paying acting homage to Nick Frost and Lena Headey who make the seemingly ordinary, enormously cool.
It is to history that the current trend for biopics in the younger generation has been taken to cinema audience’s hearts, and whilst there will be those who raise more than eyebrow and suggest openly that how can you have a story told about you when you are under 50, that it is almost a sense of the unrealistic expectation that someone dare write their autobiography before they are 30; to that end it can only be reminded that some people live such extraordinary lives that their tale deserves to be told, no matter their age, no matter their particular reason for having hit the headlines.
If it convinces or inspires someone to be better, to go beyond the expected line in which their lives will take them, then all power to them. We have gone past the idea of history being written from the top down, perhaps we need to realise that everybody has something in them that makes them glow in this ring we call life.
Ian D. Hall