At 50, Rocky Still Knows What Losing Costs
The original Rocky finds its victory in a man looking for Adrian after a fight he was never expected to win. I Play Rocky revisits the much harder business of getting that ending on screen.
At the end of Rocky, there are a lot of people with a legitimate reason to want the boxer’s attention. The officials have a decision to announce. Reporters can finally ask a man who had been taken for an obliging opponent how he came to survive fifteen rounds with Apollo Creed. The room is ready to turn what happened into a story about the fight. Rocky keeps trying to find Adrian. Sylvester Stallone makes the insistence sound at once like the simplest thing his character knows and the first thing he has managed to make clear through the noise. A victory has already taken place for somebody, and most of the people in the room have very little means of recognizing it.
Fifty years on, the training run and the raised arms have an independent public life. They can supply the image of an accomplishment to anyone who needs one, often without the small, often discouraging world that gives the climb its value. Peter Farrelly’s I Play Rocky brings the franchise back to a different risk. A young Stallone has a script that people are prepared to buy and a demand that makes it harder to sell. The movies are most interesting together while both men still have reasons to believe the thing they want may cost them the best opportunity they have had.
The life available before the offer
John G. Avildsen spends more time around Rocky’s ordinary life than the reputation of the training montage might lead a new viewer to expect. There is the first fight in a modest room, the work collecting debts for a local loan shark, the gym where Mickey is perfectly willing to make Rocky feel like somebody who has wasted what he once had. The neighborhood has known him long enough for his standing in it to be fairly settled. Stallone gives the man a way of greeting people and filling a pause that makes it possible to imagine an entire day passing without anybody asking him what he thinks his life should become.
Adrian has a different set of limits on the attention she receives. Talia Shire does remarkable work in the early scenes at the pet shop, where being quiet can be a way of getting through an encounter other people have decided to make awkward. Rocky talks more than he needs to, in part because he is hoping she will give him a reason to stay. The scenes give both performers a little room to show how much effort an ordinary conversation can require. Their time at the skating rink is valuable for the same reason. The place is practically empty, the visit is short, and there is room for two people to learn something about each other before anyone else needs the encounter to be interesting.
Those are the stakes the opportunity to fight can change. The invitation gives Rocky an available story about his life, with a public role and a difficult deadline. It also puts pressure on the modest trust he and Adrian have begun to acquire. The person looking after a boxer has to deal with what can happen to his body, which is a more immediate concern than what anybody will call him after the bout. The movie is perceptive about how a new chance to be seen in public can make a private relationship more necessary to the person receiving the attention.
Apollo has a workable idea for a show
Carl Weathers makes Apollo interesting because he understands the show he has decided to run. Giving a local unknown a title shot can be sold as a public generosity and controlled as a fight. The Bicentennial staging puts an enormous image of national possibility around a professional arrangement that looks favorable to the champion. Weathers brings enough pleasure to Apollo’s command of the room for the film to risk making it enjoyable. His mistake is an intelligible one. He believes the opponent can perform his part in the story without significantly changing its shape.
The fight is stronger for making Apollo competent. If he were chiefly a bully whose power needed to be exposed, the work required to survive fifteen rounds would be a route to a reassuring answer about who deserves to be champion. The distance Rocky has to go is difficult because Apollo is able to make it difficult. Avildsen allows the cost to become visible in pauses, damaged faces and the length of time a man must remain available to another round. Winning would be a possible result of the contest. Staying has already become an accomplishment the fight can make real before it has settled the result.
The ending depends on that separation. The noise of the arena can obscure the announcement and make the meeting between Rocky and Adrian carry more force than a clean view of a trophy could. Adrian has her own trip through the people around the ring. She has to get to him in a space whose immediate business is to announce what his body has just done. The encounter leaves the fight visible without making the public account of it the main thing either of them needs to hear. It gives both people a reason to remember a night that the surrounding crowd will remember for something else.
The bet looks different from the other side of the desk
I Play Rocky has the advantage of a credible obstacle. Stallone wants to play the lead in his own screenplay. A producer can see the attraction in the writing and have an entirely practical reason for wanting an established name attached to it. Anthony Ippolito is best when he plays that encounter without the ease of someone whose condition is obviously going to be met. The familiar voice can arrive in a room as a reason for someone to underestimate him. The most interesting thing the actor can do with an imitation is make the audience briefly hear what the person deciding whether to take the meeting would have heard.
Farrelly also has the benefit of a story about how people make a picture at a scale where somebody can run out of time. The producers have a problem to solve that involves more than appreciating Stallone. A shoot has to be paid for and the film has to work for people who were never present to hear the original offer. Once the production is under way, the film can treat a location or a piece of coverage as an immediate need. Those practicalities are worth a place in the story because they allow a known image to become somebody’s uncertain day of work.
The trouble comes from the force of the original’s reputation. An audience recognizes the details it is waiting to see and can enjoy their appearance as evidence that the work is on the right course. That pleasure is real. It can also reduce the time in which a producer’s caution or a spouse’s worries sound persuasive. The original survives the arrival of its famous images because the people in it have things to do that matter independently of whether the audience will remember the images. A movie about making Rocky comes closest to that vitality when the people helping to get it done are still entitled to be unsure.
The interruption worth keeping
A good anniversary can restore a film’s scale after some of its images have grown too large to see plainly. The training run deserves its popularity. So do the early conversations whose consequences a run cannot settle, and the noisy aftermath in which Rocky needs somebody to find him. I Play Rocky gives us another way to notice the improbability of assembling those parts. It also makes the original’s modest definition of what counts as a good night feel unusually clear. The man everybody has come to see can get the ending he needs while the officials are still telling the crowd what happened.
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