Tyson (2008)

May 23, 2009

Varsity Theater, Seattle, WA

** / ****

By Scott Muoio

Former boxing world heavyweight champion Mike Tyson is a simple man. He is scared. He is angry. And he trusts no one. Over the years we have learned this about him through a series of astounding and peculiar highs and lows. James Toback’s Tyson tells Mike’s story in Tyson’s own words, and like Tyson, is simple, peculiar and bizarrely self-aware.

The film’s theory on Mike’s history is simple and one that anyone familiar with Tyson’s legacy has already heard a hundred times. Mike grew up in the impoverished Brownsville section of Brooklyn, was abandoned as a youth, bullied, and then rescued by elderly boxing trainer Cus D’Amato and his own pigeon-tending hobby. Ever since, Mike has fought in and outside the ring to reign in his fear and give love without receiving it as he desperately struggles to uncover what it means to be a man without ever having had a role model he could completely believe in. With memories of old fight films and the voice of Cus still lingering in his mind, Tyson is the epitome of an extreme man who peaked too soon and will never figure out how to reinvent himself for future peace and solace.

Using split screens, an abundance of fight footage, and Mike, himself in mega-close-up to recall his life during his historic boxing career Tyson is as much psychiatry session as it is straight forward documentary. Using Mike’s face like Andy Warhol did images of modern consumerism, Toback plasters it in repetition on the screen, his mumbling words blending like “voices in the head.” The result leaves us moderately distracted yet mostly free to divulge our own interpretation of Tyson’s meaning to himself and the world around him. Unfortunately, Toback’s method creates a one trick Tyson pony that is more caricature than real life human being.

The caricature of Tyson is one that viewers unfamiliar with Mike might be surprised to discover; that at age twenty he was the youngest heavyweight boxing champion in history, that he was convicted of rape and served three years in jail at the peak of his boxing career, and that bankruptcy, a psychopathic mid-match ear-biting binge, and a cadre of bizarre quotes and comments are the true reason he continues to be a media curiosity twenty years past his prime. Unfortunately, those facts could just as easily have been discovered by reading almost any account of Tyson’s life as they could by viewing Toback’s documentary.

Why then use the medium of film? To show Mike’s loneliness? To isolate his inconsistencies, his verbosity, his self-aware misery?

What a Mike Tyson film can and should give Tyson’s legacy that words cannot is a true glimpse into his humanity. Where Toback seems to think posing Tyson on the beach in a suit or sitting him on his couch recalling his own history makes the myth of Tyson more human than cartoon, it is clear from the beginning that it does not. Watch closely and you will see only one clip in the film that strays from Toback’s template illuminating the man as more than a myth: a twenty second bit of home movie that shows Mike play fighting with his daughter. Outside of that, Mike the man, Mike the father, Mike walking through his old neighborhood, Mike with friends, Mike showing us family photos… those are the images a great Mike Tyson documentary should feature and which, unfortunately this one does not.

The bottom line on this Tyson documentary is as obvious as the film, itself: Toback’s Tyson is an encyclopedia entry with one silly editing trick, nothing more, nothing less.

Director: James Toback

Writer: James Toback

Starring: Mike Tyson

Editor: Aaron Yanes