Fat City (John Huston, 1972) (Patreon)

Given the high reputation of Fat City, I suppose it shouldn't surprise me that it's quite a lovely movie, and a deeply sympathetic portrait of losers still struggling to believe that they aren't yet down for the count. But this is kind of a sly film, and I spent about half of it thinking I should be impressed but wasn't really. That's because Fat City suggests that it's going to be a few things that it's not. First, I sort of expected a boxing film. And while it's not exactly accurate to say that it isn't a boxing film -- two of the main characters, Billy (Stacy Keach) and Ernie (Jeff Bridges) are low level pugilists in nowheresville Stockton -- Huston minimizes any dramatic thrill that prizefighting might ordinarily present. There is really only one extended bout (Billy Tully vs. Lucero), and even that is a short, ugly slugfest. The sweet science has seldom looked more bitter.

The other thing is that I thought Huston was going to default into the sort of lunkheaded faux-regionalism that usually just makes a fetish of urban poverty. And Fat City avoids that for the most part. There's an uncomfortable amount of the film that takes place in a dive bar, a few doors down from the flophouse where Billy's staying. These scenes resemble the Ross brothers' Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets to a degree that Fat City must have been an influence, at least subconsciously. There's a suitably gritty ambiance, but it tends to be drowned out by Susan Tyrrell's shrill, ostentatious performance as barfly Oma. She behaves as if she's in a Cassavetes screen test, blowsy and hair-triggered, and serves mainly as a foil for Billy, a functional alcoholic who seems reasonable by comparison. (If it weren't for Candy Clark's role as Ernie's wife, it'd be hard to defend the film from a charge of misogyny.)

I must say, nothing I've ever seen from Huston suggested that he had a film like Fat City in him. This strikes me as an avant la lettre specimen of the sort of stripped-down Sundance indie that established filmmakers sometimes produce as a means of woodshedding, reconnecting with "the art." (The entire back half of Soderbergh's filmography is comprised of projects like this.) He's so often been a stentorian director, content to showcase big stars delivering big performances. Here, everything but Oma is so dialed back, so lived in. An old, battered glove of a film, really.