‘The Survivor’: Barry Levinson’s Boxing Biopic With Ben Foster Both Embraces & Subverts Its Formulas [TIFF Review]

What a strange career Barry Levinson has had. The Baltimore-born filmmaker burst onto the scene in 1982 with “Diner” and embarked on a winning streak that’s still somewhat astonishing — his hits from the period included “Tin Men,” “Good Morning, Vietnam,” “Rain Man,” and “Bugsy.” And then came 1992’s “Toys,” and after it, a steady cascade of real clunkers: “Jimmy Hollywood,” “Disclosure,” “Sphere,” “Envy,” “Man of the Year,” “Rock the Kasbah,” and so on. It wasn’t a complete pivot to trash, like that of, say, his contemporary Rob Reiner, and occasionally he’d give us a “Sleepers” or “Wag the Dog” — or, strangest of all, the bluntly effective found-footage eco-horror movie “The Bay.” But it’s been quite some time since we had a genuinely successful Barry Levinson film (theatrically, at least, as he’s turned out a series of very good, based-on-a-true-story HBO films like “You Don’t Know Jack” and “The Wizard of Lies”). 

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But “The Survivor” is that film — and oddly, it feels like it could have come during that ‘80s hot streak because it’s the kind of adult-oriented, character-driven, period-set drama that used to be his specialty (and doesn’t really get made, at least by studios, very much anymore). Per the opening titles, it is “based on the memories of Harry Haft,” a late-‘40s era prizefighter introduced at his fights as “the pride of Poland and the survivor of Auschwitz.”

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By first-time screenwriter Justine Juel Gillmer, the script tells the story in three intermingling timelines, beginning with Haft (played with characteristic power by Ben Foster) wandering a beach in Georgia in 1963, an old man in turmoil. The bulk of the story is set in New York in the late 1940s and early 1950s, but with frequent and potent flashbacks to his time in the concentration camp.

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Haunted and shell-shocked, he’s in the midst of a bad stretch of fights; when he gets in the ring, Levinson intercuts the violence of those bouts with the violence of his past. “Clear your head!” his trainer shouts, but it’s not that simple; “I don’t think of the past,” he explains. “The past just comes.” Haft wants to get into the ring with Rocky Marciano, not yet the champ but certainly a rising star — not out of pride or greed, but simply for the publicity. The woman he loved, clear back in Poland, was taken to the camps. But he’s certain she survived and believes if he becomes a famous fighter, she will see his name in the papers.

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“If you’re straight with me, I will plaster your story all over the east coast,” insists Emory Anderson (Peter Sarsgaard), a newspaper reporter. “Whatever it is, you can’t shock me.” And so Harry Haft tells his story of how he survived Auschwitz by boxing; Schneider (Billy Magnussen), a high-ranking officer, watched him fight a guard, saw a way to make money, and trained him to fight in boxing matches at the camp, “to help the officers pass the time” (and gamble). Haft’s opponents are other prisoners, and after the first, he discovers that these bouts are “last man standing” affairs. He’s literally fighting for his life.

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“The Survivor” is occasionally infected by the aridness of the handsome, well-made historical film — it feels old-fashioned, in both the complimentary and pejorative senses. But some of that is purposeful and even a little subversive. Anderson, the newspaperman, writes his story, and sure enough, Harry gets the Marciano fight — and Gillmer toys with the structure we’re used to because that fight, the big climax of most movies of this kind, arrives at the one’s midpoint. And it is not a come-from-behind underdog victory, as most fight fans know — there’s a frankly incredible moment when he realizes he’s not going to win, that he doesn’t have it in him, that he’s not the better fighter, and everyone else sees it too. 

To put it mildly, that is a story beat we don’t get in sports movies or biopics in general. But this isn’t a movie about triumphing through adversity in the ring; it’s about doing it in your heart and your mind, which is far, far more difficult. And so Gillmer and Levinson brush up against the easy answers of lesser films — faith, fame, the love of a wonderful woman — and shake them away, just as their protagonist does. Years later, he is still tortured. These aren’t the kinds of things you just get over.

Much of this, as you might expect, is hard to watch. The fight scenes, especially in the camp, are absolutely harrowing — particularly a numbing, marathon fight (30 rounds) into the dark of night, which reduces Harry to a bloodied mess and reveals a darkness he didn’t realize he had inside him. (The concentration camp sequences are shot in black and white, presumably for the purposes of story separation, with the bonus of allowing cinematographer George Steel to simultaneously ape “Raging Bull” and “Schindler’s List”). The compositions are striking, telling mountains of story in the simplest of images, and Douglas Crise’s editing is taut— the juxtapositions are powerful, and often unexpected.

Levinson assembles a tip-top ensemble cast, full of valuable utility players like Magnussen and Sarsgaard, as well as John Leguizamo, Danny DeVito, and Paul Bates as the various players of the Marciano fight (there’s a scene with all of them together at a training session, joking and kibitzing and strategizing, that I could’ve watched for hours). Vicky Krieps is the woman who first helps Harry and then falls for him, and while she doesn’t have much to work with early on — it seems like a kind of dull romantic lead — but the longer it goes, the more she gets to reveal and play.

And Foster, per usual, is excellent. The physical transformation, de rigueur for both survival stories and boxing movies, is astonishing — he’s frighteningly gaunt in the camp scenes, in fighting shape in the ‘40s, schlubby in the ‘60s. But it’s the interior work that matters. There’s an extraordinary moment early on where he gets a piece of good news and breaks down into a simultaneous release of relief, laughter, and tears; more pointed (and Oscar clippy) is the scene when he finally confesses the deepest, darkest secret, the thing that keeps him up night after night.

It’s a formulaic scene, carefully constructed and following the lead of countless films before it. But it’s played with such depth and pain that it works anyway. And you can probably say the same for the entire movie. [B+]

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