The breaking machine is in theaters on Friday October 3.
There is a scene somewhere in the middle of the breaking machine which involves a knife, a cactus and a slight disagreement. It is a light argument that the public will know. It is likely that you had this exact conversation, but the way this version is blocked, the way the accessories play in the subtext is absolutely trying. There is a juxtaposition of violence and politeness at the center of this scene which makes the machine to break a really fascinating film to watch.
From Benny Safdie, half of the Safdie brothers whose right time and the uncoupped gems fired exactly zero blows with their characters and their subject, the breaking machine continues the brand of the anchored and flawless filmmaker of obsessive people, just with a little less power behind his blows.
The breaking machine is the true story of Mark Kerr and the first days of MMA fights. It is a biopic with an already written end, and for the writer / director Benny Safdie, it is a kind of first. Apart from Lenny Cooke, a documentary on a high school basketball phenomenon, Safdie has remained squarely in fiction, therefore a sports film based on a story of him is an interesting proposal. One of his determining attributes as a filmmaker is a kind of relentless realism which is generally linked to stories of very obsessed people. Although an MMA fighter seems to be a natural adjustment for the narration of Safdie, it is the biopic part, where he is handcuffed to a certain extent in terms of what he can dramatize the events that really happened, which were most curious to me.
But before you get there, you have to start any conversation on this film with Dwayne Johnson. His turn as Kerr has of course been the subject of a lot of oscars and ovation buzz in film festivals, and it is an impressive performance and quite different from him. There is a cynical way of looking at the prosthetic makeup and the kind of impression of Mark Kerr which he affects in his voice as a Oscar, but the rock, as he is not used to doing, really put the work. It is really a different role for him and not only the nuances of the charismatic personality that he has perfected in the ring for years.
But I don’t think that performance in a vacuum is an Oscar caliber, but you have to appreciate the way the film as a whole is designed to highlight Johnson’s work. Benny Safdie put it in a specific position to succeed. He put it in front of Emily Blunt, who is inaccessibly brilliant in everything. They clearly like to work together and they are already friends, so there is a level of comfort there that you cannot simulate. Blunt, as Kerr’s girlfriend, has a trip as interesting as the holder to break, with problems to manage. It is the strength of Blunt’s performance which leaves an open question to most of the film: “Who is the worst influence on whom?”
But when he does not act opposite Blunt, Johnson often works with non-actors. Ryan Bader, for example, does an absolutely good, even admirable job, even as Mark Coleman, the best friend, Kerr training partner and sometimes opponent. Bader is a MMA moonlight as an actor, although as a performance as useful as it gives, he does not hold a candle to what the rock does. It should not be supposed either.
So the film sets up Johnson to look great, whether it has its own opposite Emily Blunt or that the comparison is better compared to a non-actor. Consequently, his performance (Academy worthy or not) strikes all the more difficult, and I am ready to offer Safdie so much credit for everyone. Of course, at this stage of his career, Johnson is wise enough to stack a deck in his favor and, as a producer of the film, he naturally contributed to it. The point here is, yes, Dwayne Johnson is as good as ever on the screen, and it was really a group effort.
But my favorite part of one or the other work of the SAFDIES is their affinity for the characters who simply cannot put the shovel. We meet them when they are already in a hole and they will be damned if they cannot continue to dig to get out. Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems and Robert Pattinson in use, for example, have the inability to simply stop and cut their losses, and do not know how to stop while they are ahead. And that’s why it’s a very interesting tour of Benny Safdie, because here is a guy from Mark Kerr who apparently East in front. It is a guy who was so successful that he literally cannot imagine losing. What makes the machine to break a clearly Safdie film is the fact that this inability to understand what a loss looks like is played as if it was just another type of hole to search.
Safdie builds these incredible assemblies built around Kerr by pleasantly speaking of the fear that he instills in his opponents, and describing this feeling super disinienced while we watch him piss always loving people. The music is just as polished, bucolic, while Mark drops his insane opponents. There are moments in the film when each technique of the Safdie bag, from the lenses to the edition to the sound design, causes a lightness of tone normally reserved for the Romcom assemblies of the first meeting of a couple at the County Fair. Only here, they are against the struggle of a guy in a good mood in an intrinsically violent sport trying to understand what he is, otherwise the breaking machine.
It is, I believe, the most interesting thing and the most worthy of profile about Mark Kerr. He forged a path that helped transform MMA into a huge industry and fought along the way. He crawled so that all the guys from the UFC you have heard of can run, so in this regard, Mark Kerr has an interesting place in the history of sport and it is a story that should be told.
The thing that the breaking machine is lacking, however, is a set of net teeth. There are not too many edges that do not seem to have been smoothed, which prevents the film from keeping away from other sports films or living properly alongside other Safdie films. There are very great moments of cinema throughout, the aforementioned knife and cactus being one of my favorites. There are scenes where the dedication of Safdie to realism and the work of the documentary style camera transform the moments of routine into legitimate emotions, like an opening of the elevator door at the wrong time which made a flow of sympathy. These things happen in a flash, but they almost always land. This is one of Safdie’s most incredible skills and is exposed throughout the breaking machine. These moments, alone, I think, are undeniably brilliant, which are worth being studied. The film, however, does not entirely reach the sum of its parts.
To return to the biopic aspect of the breaking machine, the film ends up feeling more honorary than anything else, as if the interest was simply that we all know the name of Mark Kerr. The teeth that this film seems missing which were so present in good time and not cut (and oh guy, the sky knows what before one or the other) could only exist in the Safdie fiction. The breaking machine seems to be a fairly undesirable report of some of the most intense years of Kerr’s life, certainly not all flattering, but the reality of the manufacture of a biopic could have caused one or two punches drawn along the way.
