When We Were Kings (1997) * * * * A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp Copyright 1998 by Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE: A perfect evocation of a defining moment in time for two men and two nations.
I was just old enough to remember the adoration and respect that Muhammad Ali commanded -- not just from blacks, but from everyone. He was an artist, and boxing was his medium. He *was* The Greatest: he embodied his ambitions perfectly. He had come out of exile, as it were, to fight a fresh young contender (George Foreman), and he won.
WHEN WE WERE KINGS is a documentary -- one of the best ever made, quite frankly -- that takes that moment in time, the "Rumble in the Jungle", and makes it feel like it's happening to us now.
Most of the footage in WHEN WE WERE KINGS had been stranded in limbo for decades, the victim of an ugly legal entanglement. Having it brought back to the light of day is important, because there are so many people today -- black, white, young, old -- who either don't remember Ali's impact, or have forgotten. The movie's power is in that it takes mere images of Ali and the men who remembered him and were near him at the time and makes them feel as though they are entering the room with us. In a curious way, this movie may actually work better on TV than in a theater, because of the intimacy factor.
The one thing that the movie makes clear, almost without trying: Ali commanded respect just by being there. Even his speech had the rhythm of his body and his movements: "I fought a rock. I punished a brick. I'm so bad I make medicine sick!" In print, the words lose their life; hearing them come out of his mouth, you understand how so many found him charismatic -- especially the Africans in Zaire, who saw in him a brother in arms.
George Foreman, on the other hand, couldn't have been more of an opposite. When George Foreman arrived in Zaire, he was seen as an outsider in many ways: he brought his dogs with him, which reminded the people of the brutality under colonial rule. (Even more shocking: few in Africa knew he was black until he arrived.) Foreman was a punishingly brutal fighter: when he finished with a punching bag, there was a dent in it that could have held water. (One rather cruelly apt joke, courtesy of Richard Pryor, summed up his approach: "Foreman's got the most unique boxing style... None. The bell ring, and he come out -- 'Which one the referee? 'Cos I 'mo *kill* the other motherf___er.'")
In private, Ali sensed that others were certain he could not win -- he was, after all, 33, while Foreman was young and fresh. But he was in it for the challenge, not for the winning -- while Foreman approached the whole thing as a fait accompli. The more you see of the two of them, the starker the contrast: Ali was privately reflective and publicly brash; Foreman was nearly subverbal everywhere.
The fight itself takes up very little of the movie's running time, and that's an intelligent decision, because we instead get the context we need to understand what happened. Foreman used up so much of his energy in trying to punish Ali into instant submission, that Ali was able to unleash his energy in reserve and KO Foreman almost at once. A frightening theory, but everything we see supports it.
The most wonderful thing about the movie is how it makes everything it discusses seem immediate and real. Documentaries tend to deal with the past as a closed chapter, over and done. This one approaches a story of legendary proportions like it's news. I can't think of a better way to do it.
syegul@cablehouse.dyn.ml.org
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