The Iron Claw Should Be Even Sadder

There’s a lot of muscled male flesh onscreen in The Iron Claw, none of it photographed in a way intended to provoke enjoyment or appreciation. In the film, which was written and directed by Sean Durkin, bodies are a source of stress more than anything else, tools to be honed for the wrestling ring and then shattered by the stresses of what happens within its boundaries or outside it afterward. The Iron Claw stars a Neapolitan assortment of screen hunks as the three oldest Von Erich brothers — Zac Efron as Kevin, Harris Dickinson as David, and Jeremy Allen White as Kerry — but it’d be a stretch to say that any of them are aestheticized, even in Lycra trunks, and not just because they’re sporting some of the worst haircuts in the history of man. Efron in particular has gotten himself into a kind of shape that verges on body horror, veins prominent under the He-Man bulges of his biceps, but for all the main cast, physicality is connected to sacrifice more than anything else. When Kevin’s approached after a match by Pam (Lily James), the woman he’ll eventually marry, he seems almost shocked that someone would see him as a romantic prospect. Or a sexual one — it’s implied, when the two canoodle in his truck outside a party, that she relieves him of his virginity.

Durkin’s last movie, the family relocation drama The Nest, was effectively a haunted-house movie without an actual haunting. The Iron Claw, in a similar if less successful fashion, is a film about a family curse in which there’s no actual curse, just a father who treats his children as grist for his own professional aspirations. Fritz Von Erich (Holt McCallany) was a pro wrestler himself, though by the time The Iron Claw really gets going, he’s become a promoter, the owner of Dallas-based World Class Championship Wrestling, whose biggest stars are his own sons. There were six Von Erich boys, though only five made it to adulthood — the oldest, Jack, died in an accident as a kid. The film consigns another sibling, Chris, to the cutting-room floor, combining some of the details of his life with those of Mike (Stanley Simons), the brother closest to his age. This sounds callous but actually comes as a relief onscreen, where the many losses the Von Erichs weather becomes downright grueling. Four brothers is enough when only one of them is left alive by the time the credits roll.

Early in the film, over dinner, Fritz lists off his current ranking of his sons from favorite to least favorite, accompanied by a reminder that positions can always change. The square-shouldered, square-headed McCallany tends to get cast as tough guys, but he’s always had nice comic timing, and his delivery in that moment is funny, fitting for times that are still optimistic. The Iron Claw allows the extent of Fritz’s corrosiveness to emerge slowly, though some of it is evident even then in how hard he is on Mike, the youngest and smallest of the four. Fritz tells his sons that nothing can hurt them if they can become the toughest, strongest, and most successful, though all they seem to do is get hurt while their dad pits them against each other, always having a preferred child he hopes will go on to become the world heavyweight champ. Kevin works the hardest, but when he’s unable to get up fast enough from a brutal throw during an important fight, Fritz turns his favor to David, who’s better in interviews and on the mic during matches. Later, it’s Kerry who becomes the treasured son after his Olympic dreams end with the U.S. boycott of the 1980 games and he returns home and joins the family business. As their devout, desiccated mother, Doris, Maura Tierney simply opts out of the household’s increasingly ugly dynamics.

The Von Erichs’ saga is too sprawling and too strange to be contained in a single movie — among the details The Iron Claw leaves out is that Fritz was born Jack Adkisson but changed his name in order to package himself as a Nazi heel in the ring, a decision that became the source of the supposed curse on his family. But in streamlining their story to emphasize the tragedies that accrue as time goes on, the film risks reducing its characters into martyrs who suffer and die on behalf of toxic masculinity. Durkin is a gifted filmmaker who tends to approach his characters from a remove — there are times in all three of his features when the people onscreen feel like still-wriggling insects being methodically pinned to a display board. In The Iron Claw, that restraint comes off as calculation. The film holds itself above the earnest naïveté of Kevin, through whom most of its action is channeled, a distance further emphasized by Durkin’s decision to give his film the rich yellow tinge of an aging photograph. But then, late in The Iron Claw comes a sequence that departs from everything that’s come before and drops us unabashedly into Kevin’s mind at a time of intense grief. It’s earnest, and corny, and utterly devastating, and it makes you yearn for a film that wasn’t so intent on holding its tragic subjects at a brawny arm’s length.