There is a thrum that pulsates through “The Iron Claw.” It runs underneath a scene where Kevin Von Erich (Zac Efron) takes himself to the limit in the ring, the only thing in focus the vibrating rope as he repeatedly throws himself against it with an intensity that hums with foreboding. The montage continues – this warped, inverse of the typical sports movie training montage – as Kevin pushes his body further and further to the brink.
The pulse of “The Iron Claw,” based on the devastating true story of the Von Erich wrestling family, is consistent, but the tone of that pulse shifts throughout. Writer/director Sean Durkin has not made just a wrestling movie, but instead a film far more interested in familial bonds and what we pass onto our children and why. It’s an earnest film, and one that can sometimes feel uncomfortable with its own earnestness, particularly in the dialogue. But when everything comes together – from the film’s achingly brutal physicality, to each soulful performance – “The Iron Claw” soars with heart.
If you know anything about professional wrestling, the Von Erich family is one synonymous with tragedy. Led by patriarch Fritz Von Erich, the Von Erichs wrestled together, won championships, and left their mark on the wrestling world as one of its most famous entities. But by 1993, five of the six Von Erich children (four of five in the film – “The Iron Claw” cuts out the youngest son Chris to limit the film’s runtime) had died; one in a freak accident at the age of 6, one from enteritis at the age of 25, and three by suidice. Kevin is the only surviving son.
“The Iron Claw” positions Fritz (Holt McCallany) as the driving force behind so much of this tragedy – the wrestler who was never quite good enough and who wouldn’t stop until one of his sons (and who cares which one?) became the best. The story unfolds from Kevin’s point of view, with Durkin using physical interaction and presence to tell us what we need to know. When we think of physicality in terms of a story about wrestling, obviously those scenes are at the forefront of our minds. But Durkin appears just as interested in the ways that physicality can be used to tell a story outside of the ring.
One of the first things Durkin presents in “The Iron Claw,” and something that remains ever present throughout, is the toll this sport can have on a body. The camera often lingers on the bodies of Kevin, Kerry (Jeremy Allen White), David (Harris Dickinson), and Mike (Stanley Simons). But the focus on Kevin’s rippling physique as grits his teeth through the pain, or on Mike’s far slimmer form compared to that of brothers as he’s thrown into the ring with the rest of them, is less appreciative than it is a warning sign. Interactions between the brothers and their parents are devoid of any warmth, a sharp contrast from their relationships with each other. When Kerry returns home from college, he shakes his father’s hand and solemnly greets his mother (a quietly devastating Maura Tierney, who does so much with so little) before leaping into the arms of his brothers, their limbs all a tangle as they embrace. Outside of that brotherly bond and outside of the ring, there seems to be no place for physical contact in the Von Erich household. So much so, that the first time Kevin’s future wife Pam (Lily James) gives him a hug – for no reason other than he seemed like he needed one, and she wanted to – his face grows heavy with the weight of that offering.
All of these moments, and all of the most impactful moments in “The Iron Claw,” take the carnality inherent in this family’s professional life and soften it, constantly reaching for a place of spirituality and vulnerability. But even in the moments that are less evocative, the performances power through. And in a movie about professional wrestling – one of the most performative things in the world – how could they not? Of all the actors, McCallany has one of the more difficult tasks. Fritz can be a bit one-note, and he’s saddled with most of the lines of dialogue that are exposition heavy. But McCallany delivers those lines with deep rooted sincerity – an odd choice for the film’s ostensible villain, but one that ultimately makes him all the more frightening. In one scene, he makes a crack about the possibility of one of his sons being able to move up in his child rankings past another. This is delivered with an almost good-natured sensibility. The words themselves sound like a joke, and your first instinct might be to laugh – people in my theater certainly did. But Fritz is dead serious, and as that sinks in, the impulse to laugh dies out.
There’s not an ironic bone in Fritz’s body, not a hint of artifice to him. It makes his ideas about family all the scarier, but it also provides a reason as to why, perhaps, he wasn’t as successful at wrestling as he wanted to be. Similarly, Kevin struggles with the artifice of the sport. Deception is not something that comes easily to him, something that becomes apparent during a scene where he struggles to believably trash talk his opponent during a filmed promo, his brother David chuckling at his lame attempts off camera.
But Kevin’s sincerity leads him to a different place than his father. For as much as “The Iron Claw” is a tragedy, there’s a palpable shift in Kevin and the film toward its latter half. While Fritz’s response to his perceived failings in the world of wrestling was to push that path on his sons, Kevin’s response – albeit one that took a long time and a lot of hurt to find – will be different. The sorrow remains, but “The Iron Claw” finds hope in that sorrow, the hope that the cycle can be broken.
