Writer-director Ash Avildsen’s biographical sports drama recounts the life of wrestler Mildred “Millie” Burke, the first million-dollar female athlete. Emily Bett Rickards carries the film on her broad shoulders in a vivid and committed performance as Mildred Burke. She’s tough, plucky, and full of heart, just as you’d expect from a fairly conventional sports drama. Burke begins as a single mother working in a diner who dreams of breaking the law of the time and becoming a woman wrestler. It’s an endearing performance that keeps interest, even when the movie sidesteps deeper character work.
Josh Lucas plays Burke’s abusive partner, promoter/trainer Billy Wolfe, with appropriate duplicity and charisma. Shifting from supporting and nourishing Burke’s talents to deriding her both emotionally and physically, he’s initially far from the simply villain role he ends up fulfilling by the end of the film. The dynamic captures the toxic manager-partner relationships that have all too often stifled or controlled powerful women in history.
Avildsen does an effective job constructing a traditional sports narrative from Burke’s story. Her rise from obscurity to stardom through the thrills and spills of small-ring wrestling bouts, facing down a myriad of opponents and obstacles, including sexist societal norms and personal betrayals, is very enjoyable. A cheesy Americana is well invoked with it’s sepia-toned cinematography and bluegrass music. The wrestling sequences are very effective at demonstrating why Burke was such a draw and the magic of the ring in contrast to the grind of everyday life.
It’s of the genre of biopic that is perhaps overly reverent to it’s subject. Burke is admirable and bravely heroic, but perhaps too unblemished, at Rickard’s expense. Wolfe’s transition from sensei to lover to cad, is under-explored and side characters surface briefly but are rarely given full dimension. There’s a nagging sense that there must be more to Burke’s story and that the film could be pushing further and saying more about the world of sports and how women, particularly muscular women, are treated in contemporary public sphere’s.
But the first thing Burke learns about professional wrestling is that there’s always a face and always a heel; someone to root for and against. These straightforward stakes are a staple of the sport, and an important factor in a sports movie. In the context of a powerful female athlete trying to carve out a legacy in familiarly oppressive times, a straightforward rags-to-riches narrative is somewhat comforting. A trickier issue to reconcile is the pacing. At around 140 minutes, the film does lose focus and the middle drags before the high-stakes “shoot” match restores the stakes and effectively builds to a satisfying climax.
Three Stars