Posted: 08/01/2006

Shadowboxer

(2005)

by Karen Petruska

As recently written in The New York Times, Lee Daniels, producer of Monster’s Ball and The Woodsman, has earned a reputation as an iconoclast. For his directorial debut, Daniels again produces challenging material in Shadowboxer. Starring Cuba Gooding Jr. and Helen Mirren as hired assassins and pseudo-incestuous lovers, the movie tracks both characters’ existential professional crisis.

When a dying Rose (the always luminous Helen Mirren) fails to murder the pregnant wife of a gangster, she helps birth the child and adopts the two orphans (mother and child) as her own. Mikey (Cuba Gooding Jr.) reluctantly concedes to Rose’s whim, but eventually his love for the child forces a similar reconsideration of the value of life. Don’t worry—there’s still a big fight at the end, and screenwriter William Lipz delivers a less than life-affirming conclusion. Killing is simply part of who these people are, but that doesn’t mean they don’t want a house in the suburbs.

Shadowboxer is violent, and appropriately so considering the subject matter. After viewing a scene in which gangster Clayton (a very buff and disturbing Stephen Dorff) murders an underling by sodomizing him with a pool stick, his wife’s subsequent admittance that she is attracted to his brutality thoroughly conveys to the audience the perversion of humanity within all these characters. Daniels doesn’t approbate their way of life; rather, he exposes the complications that arise when characters capable of evil try to have a regular home life.

Daniels evidences a bizarre fascination with bodily functions. The sound effects during the birth are a little more realistic than I needed, but other bodily functions, including sex and urination, receive an equally realistic and vivid depiction. Daniels practically makes a fetish of Gooding Jr.’s naked form, though Dorff exposes quite a bit of skin as well. Perhaps intending a raw effect, the film’s graphic verisimilitude made me squirm in my seat.

But again, this is perhaps appropriate. Daniels’ no holds barred approach certainly suits a film that features such viciousness, but his intent is not merely to gross us out. Rather, the vibrancy of the dark aspects of the film draws into stark relief the façade of the nuclear family created by Rose and Mikey. No scene better demonstrates this intentional juxtaposition than Rose’s death. (Spoiler alert) Making love in a fairy tale-esque grove, surrounded by bright greenery and dramatic red flowers that match the flowing red dress worn by Rose, Mikey shoots Rose in the head. The heightened setting seems absurd, but Daniels is not without method in his madness: Rose’s death is all the more shocking within these lush and pure surroundings.

On the other hand, the above scene also demonstrates how hard Daniels is working to be deep. He simply takes this film too darn seriously. Mixing high brow effects with a deeply lowbrow script, Daniels never finds his rhythm. Shadowboxer holds the audience at a distance through its manic pacing and depiction of a deeply restrained (enigmatic) main character. During a love scene in which Mikey performs a seduction dance, his smile reminded me that this film lacks life. Gooding Jr. plays Mikey with so much restraint that he becomes a lifeless cypher. As a result, the audience may be occasionally shocked but never moved. Failing to evoke an emotional response, Shadowboxer ends up being a darn quirky but failed foray into the heart of a killer.

Karen Petruska is a film critic in Chicago.

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