Fight­ing with My Family

The his­to­ry of pro-wrestling movies is mixed, to say the least. For every The Wrestler there’s a Ready to Rum­ble, a film that appears so embar­rassed to be talk­ing about wrestling that it goes out of its way to ridicule it. There are many great doc­u­men­taries, too, which pay trib­ute to wrestling’s clichés and the peo­ple behind the soap opera the­atrics. This brings us nice­ly to Fight­ing with My Fam­i­ly, which for bet­ter or worse is all of those things.

Based on a 2012 TV doc­u­men­tary of the same name, the sto­ry focus­es on the ambi­tions on Saraya Bevis (Flo­rence Pugh), who hails from a fam­i­ly of pro­fes­sion­al wrestlers in Nor­wich. Her par­ents, Julie (Lena Head­ly) and Patrick (Nick Frost), run a local pro­mo­tion where Saraya and her broth­er Zak (Jack Low­den) are the top stars, with Zak also work­ing as the head train­er, show­ing local kids – includ­ing a blind boy – how to run the ropes and take bumps.

The sib­lings dream of com­pet­ing for WWE, the world’s biggest wrestling com­pa­ny, and after per­sis­tent calls they are invit­ed to a tri­al in Lon­don. It’s here that the once tight unit of Saraya and Zak is com­pro­mised, as only Saraya is signed up and whisked off to the WWE’s devel­op­men­tal camp in Flori­da, leav­ing Zak to bit­ter­ly lick his wounds and con­tem­plate what could have been.

As he grows more and more despon­dent, Saraya, now rebrand­ed as ​“Paige”, dis­cov­ers that her pale com­plex­ion and goth appear­ance is nei­ther the norm in Flori­da nor the WWE. This leads the pair to reap­praise what they val­ue in life and what got them this far.

For a film cen­tred around an indus­try that calls itself ​‘sports enter­tain­ment,’ Fight­ing with My Fam­i­ly isn’t too inter­est­ed in the art of wrestling, which is to its ben­e­fit. By focus­ing on the unique and amus­ing fam­i­ly dynam­ic, we are allowed instead to appre­ci­ate the fine sup­port­ing cast on show. Although Pugh is the main focus, play­ing her role with a naïve sin­cer­i­ty, the ground­ed per­for­mance giv­en by Low­den gives the film a real sense of work­ing-class grit and authenticity.

Else­where, Frost is on reli­ably good form and is giv­en many of the fun­ni­est lines. Vince Vaugh­an plays a believ­able vet­er­an whose seen Saraya’s sto­ry all too often and Dwayne John­son aka The Rock brings some gen­uine A‑list charis­ma and cred­i­bil­i­ty to pro­ceed­ings, even though his involve­ment in the sto­ry isn’t entire­ly accurate.

The film only strug­gles when it switch­es focus to the actu­al wrestling. In-ring sequences feel a lit­tle clunky and con­fus­ing, nev­er ful­ly cap­tur­ing the jaw-drop­ping feats that wrestlers are capa­ble of. The awe and spec­ta­cle of a live wrestling show or the emo­tions that per­form­ers also falls a lit­tle flat, feel­ing more like a re-enact­ment than the gen­uine article.

If you’re already famil­iar with Saraya’s sto­ry you won’t be dis­ap­point­ed, as direc­tor Stephen Mer­chant plays to the strengths of the orig­i­nal doc­u­men­tary, pitch­ing his film as a crowd-pleas­ing, heart­felt fam­i­ly dra­ma. Though it doesn’t dig deep­er into the harsh real­i­ties that many pro­fes­sion­al and ama­teur wrestlers face, this is a wel­come addi­tion to a wild­ly var­ied cin­e­mat­ic lineage.