The Iron Claw (2023 | USA | 130 minutes | Paul King)

Aside from the befuddling choice to release on Christmas Day, Sean Durkin’s new film about the tragic true story of the Von Erich brothers and their family wrestling dynasty hits most of the right marks. Who am I to say that Sad Dads don’t deserve a little something to watch during the holidays, too?

Zac Efron, bulked nearly beyond recognition, gives what’s easily a career redefining performance as Kevin, the heir apparent to family’s world championship dreams. Following an opening sequence that sets the stage for the family’s consuming quest for legacy, we meet Efron in arising from bed in tight white briefs to begin his rigorous daily training (while reflecting in voiceover on the family’s alleged curse). He and his four brothers (a fifth is omitted from the film) are inseparable and gifted, more coached than parented by a gruff and ambitious father (Mindhunter favorite Holt McCallany) who bluntly introduces his children and their talents in blunt order of preference with the best line of the year: “everyone knows I have my favorites, but the rankings can always change.”

Kevin is the designated star, but circumstances from the personal talents to global politics (the US boycott of the 1980 Olympics), in turn brings each brother into the ring. The transition to the family business is more natural for jacked athlete Kerry (Jeremy Allen White) and David (Harris Dickinson) with his natural charisma; while the youngest brother Mike (Stanley Simons) being torn from music represents an almost cruel exertion of parental pressure.

Durkin’s The Nest plumbed psychological depths; so the self-avowed wrestling fanatic applies similar pathos to the ache at the heart of this family with its overbearing father and emotionally absent mother (Maura Tierney). One by one, they rise and fall, subsumed more by the pressures of expectations and the inability to be honest about their struggles. It’s a cunning parallel to the highly choreographed world of professional wrestling. To director’s credit, the competitions look authentically fake, yet at the years roll past and eighties icons come and go, the stakes remain very real. Efron quietly bears the accumulation of soul-crushing disappointments and the pain of bearing witness to his family’s litany of increasing grim fates. The film’s major misstep is in an over-reach to imagine a note of grace for its doomed brothers; the effort toward sweetness nearly curdled the entire project. But the strength of Efron’s work, particularly in the film’s final coda salvages it. To butcher another quote, he won’t let us forget that even if the action in the ring is fake, it doesn’t mean that the pain doesn’t hurt.

Maestro (2023 | USA | 129 minutes | Bradley Cooper)

In his second turn at directing, Bradley Cooper follows up A Star Is Born with another film about a towering musical personality, this time a real one: conductor/composer Leonard Bernstein. Again, Cooper thrusts himself into the central role in an athletic performance of a personality that clearly means a great deal to him and to American musical history. Alas, making good art about something or someone you love dearly can be the hardest thing of all, so it’s kind of heartbreaking that the colossal effort to depict the life of this monumental figure fell so spectacularly flat.

Cooper approaches the life story of Bernstein largely through lens of his marriage with the actress Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan doing reliably exceptional work). When we first meet Lenny, he’s in bed with a man, getting his call-up to fill-in to conduct a national broadcast from Carnegie Hall. It’s the opportunity that will launch his career; soon after, he’ll meet Felicia at a party where they’ll fall into a mismatched kind of love. These early scenes are shot in blue-tinged monochrome and lean on dreamlike aesthetics: a kiss at a dusty playhouse, Bernstein dancing passionately in one of his musicals, stumbling into a marriage proposal. It’s one with an unconventional (if not uncommon) understanding to spend their lives together, even while he pursues sex and relationships with other men.

We begin to understand the reality of that arrangement when the film snaps to full color, the freedom that it gives to Lenny contrasts with the toll borne by Felicia. Decades and fashions pass by, Cooper’s hair and makeup become less, then more, aggressive. Lines of cocaine disappear, children grow older, lovers become less concealed, a Snoopy balloon passes by in the Macy’s parade. Casting this story as one of a marriage is an understandable angle, but Cooper’s fascination with Bernstein’s sexuality and libertine egomania comes at the near-exclusion of almost everything else.

The very little that we learn about why Bernstein was a significant figure or the dimensions of his genius are relegated to recreations of television interviews or magazine profiles. Cooper famously donned a prosthetic nose and trained for months to learn to conduct a six-minute sequence, but never really shows us the man behind the impenetrable fortifications of a collections of impressions and attention-seeking impersonations. We scarcely understand what made Bernstein so special, let alone even what a conductor does or what makes one great. His showy performance may come from a place of admiration, and it’s one that his peers may celebrate at awards season, but I found myself allergic to the effort on display. Give me TÁR over this any day.

Ferrari (2023 | USA | 131 minutes | Michael Mann)

And so it has come to pass that another great director has allowed Adam Driver to do accent work. Here, it’s Michael Mann and the Italian is in service of the title role of Enzo Ferrari, captured at a perilous crossroads of personal reputation and financial ruin. It’s 1957 and Driver’s styled behind trademark sunglasses and dark suits. His accent is nowhere near as outlandish as anything in House of Gucci or in whatever Shailene Woodley is doing as his wartime mistress (and mother of his officially unacknowledged child).

The race cars maker finds his business in peril as custom orders have begun to dry up, weary to lower his esteemed enterprise to the cater to consumers like some of his competitors. Further, their long held speed record has just been snatched away by Maserati. Thus comes the gambit of raising the company by dominating a multi-day thousand mile cross-country race through the public thoroughfares of Italy.

Mann’s work with the racing sequences is a mix of hit and spectacularly laugh-inducing misses, so much so that I began to wonder whether my screener disc was the final version. Still, the cars always look amazing so you can forgive the script’s heavy-handed foregrounding of one after another charismatic driver is dispatched to impending doom of charismatic drivers with all the grace of naming a sailboat the “Live-4-ever“. After all, we know that Ferrari endures as a premier luxury automaker all these years later; so at least Mann is having some fun getting us there in chill sleek fashion. Driver is convincing in his depiction of Enzo, a former racer himself most comfortable with the next generator of talent behind the wheel. He conveys a maniacal determination to persevere in the face of great personal losses (the death of his son) and salvage the company that he started with his wife with such determination that it propels over the many bumps along the way.

In fact, Driver’s scenes with Penélope Cruz, as Enzo’s wife Laura, are the film’s highest octane components. Just as Laura’s financial machinations are the key to the racing company’s endurance, Cruz’s portrayal of a betrayed (and still grieving) wife is where the film shifts to its highest gear and really purrs to life. Their scenes together are electric and establish the personal and financial stakes of their gambit to save the company as well as the potentially painful consequences to their family’s legacy. The film’s not perfect, but it rides high enough on mood and a love of automotive history that it’s well worth a test drive.