Can there be a movie that nails it just too well to the point you don’t even enjoy it?
Playing at New York’s Film Forum for the last week (and closing up this Thursday), God, John Huston’s 1972 “Fat City,” was depressing. A tormenting examination of a former boxer turned destitute down-and-out bum and seasoned alcoholic (a painfully convincing Stacy Keach, not necessarily in a good way), this is one of those rare time when cheap, what-you-see-is-what-you-get production values help transport you into the authentic skid row milieu of three-time losers, barely-minimum wage living and bottom-of-the-bottle existence.
Every pathetic and hard-to-watch frame exudes the pungent rancor of underwear and pit stains, the taste of cigarette ash in your lukewarm Budweiser and a cheap, scuzzy fuck. If it was Huston’s intention to capture the noxious odor of b.o. and societal greazzzze, well, congratulations, he succeed. Essentially a slight cut above a scuzzploitation B-movie in the vein of “Barfly,” but nowhere near as fun, “Fat City,” tracks the fallen career of Tully (Keach) and his pitiful attempt to get his boxing vocation back on track (though you get the sense that “career” was no more than a few hundred dollar wads smushed into a pair of crusty jeans after a few relatively successful fights).
Now reconstituted as a scuzzbag classic (by highbrow irony fiends like Film Comment who tend to delight in slumming for lower-class trash), “Fat City,” genuinely captures patheticness, but to what end? There’s nary a glitter of hope in this grimly-lit chronicle of a life that’s essentially hit rock bottom at past-his-prime 30 — a grisly thought, especially in this day and age.
A young Jeff Bridges stars as a dumb, blank-stared and wet-behind-the-ears kid Ernie, who Keach mentors and encourages into boxing and I suppose his relative success (not in the gutter by the end) despite knocking up his teenage girlfriend (the debut of Candy Clark), is some form of promise, but the wholly unglamorous film — which contains some of the most flat and undynamic boxing scenes ever committed to film — and its coterie of gutter-bound beautiful losers is just unapologetically ugly.
Susan Tyrell, who plays Keach’s frightful-looking, perpetually intoxicated lushbag girlfriend was actually nominated for an Oscar for this film, and you can see why as she appears as the haggard real-deal.
“Fat City,” and its deadbeat cast of has-been characters — painfully delusional and cheapskate coaches like Nicholas Colasanto, who was adored for playing the dimwitted Coach on TV’s “Cheers” — isn’t a bad movie and perhaps it just too expertly depicts commiserable also-rans and flops cause all we wanted to do afterwards was take a shower or drink ourselves into oblivion to escape the taste of out and out failure.
The yellow, cigarette/cum stained filters venerable cinematographer Conrad Hall used were celebrated in the documentary, “Visions Of Light: The Art of Cinematography,” and we suppose crud can be artful. Keep in mind, we’re not dismissing the film, but we’d be lying if the dire grimness was a bit too much to take on this particular evening. Maybe we could just use a Xanax.