Stronger

Mama always said life is like a David Gor­don Green movie: you nev­er know what you’re gonna get. The one-time heir appar­ent of the Amer­i­can indie cin­e­ma crown has safe­ly emerged from his stoned sojourn in the woods of weed com­e­dy, and yet not ful­ly intact. His Prince Avalanche and Joe flashed enough glints of his patience and bone-deep human­ism to con­firm that at least they were still present in his brain, then along came the shod­dy, unfo­cused Man­gle­horn and Our Brand Is Cri­sis to cast doubt on his com­pe­tence all over again. If noth­ing else, Green’s blos­somed into a won­der­ful sus­pense film­mak­er, in the sense that the vary­ing lev­els of qual­i­ty in his work become appar­ent with all the ten­sion of a Shya­malanesque twist.

It’s a pleas­ant sur­prise, then, that the ver­sion of Green who knows what he’s doing shows up for the sober­ing, unsen­ti­men­tal Stronger. He brings his A‑game to a project more fraught with train­wreck poten­tial than any­thing he’s tack­led before, demon­strat­ing a refresh­ing shrewd­ness and restraint in a nar­ra­tive that could have eas­i­ly melt­ed into gooey hagiog­ra­phy or pat inspi­ra­tional­ism. Like so many biopics that have come before, the account of Boston Marathon bomb­ing sur­vivor Jeff Bau­man (Jake Gyl­len­haal) revolves around the virtues of resilience and courage. And in telling the stir­ring sto­ry of the dou­ble amputee’s rocky jour­ney back to func­tion­al­i­ty, Green rede­fines the qual­i­ty of brav­ery. Not by lion­is­ing his subject’s choic­es or behav­iour, mind you, but rather by hero­ical­ly con­fronting the truth that Bau­man is no hero.

In actu­al­i­ty, the guy is kind of a dick, and Bauman’s guilt that he doesn’t deserve his new­found sta­tus sparks the dif­fi­cult dra­ma ele­vat­ing this film. Green side­steps most of the horse­shit endem­ic to the biopic genre — undue adu­la­tion for the sub­ject, over­ly tidy pre­sen­ta­tions of con­tra­dic­to­ry lives — by focus­ing on the incon­gruity between unde­pend­able wastrel Bau­man and the sym­bol­ic man­tle thrust upon him. Bauman’s more com­fort­able throw­ing back Miller High Lifes with his town­ie bud­dies than play­ing poster boy for the Boston Strong move­ment, and his lin­ger­ing PTSD doesn’t make the tran­si­tion into a pub­lic fig­ure any eas­i­er. (In its most vul­ner­a­ble moments, the film evokes the sto­ry of Harold Rus­sell in William Wyler’s clas­sic melo­dra­ma, The Best Years of Our Lives.)

Aside from a few mawk­ish mis­steps near the tail end, this film feels like the prod­uct of a con­fi­dent, able and self-aware direc­tor. Green steers his actors towards under­played sub­tle­ty; Gyl­len­haal doesn’t shy away from the ugli­er sides of Bau­man and his predica­ment, and Tatiana Maslany near­ly steals the film as his long-suf­fer­ing girl­friend Erin Hur­ley. Green knows to lean into the region­al speci­fici­ties in New Eng­land native John Pollono’s script, root­ing Bau­man in a recog­nis­ably real­is­tic set­ting far from inci­den­tal to the plot at hand. Everything’s work­ing as it should be. Green’s pen­du­lum has swung back in the direc­tion of favour, but with his Hal­loween sequel not far on the hori­zon, the ques­tion per­sists for how long.