In 2019, Zac Efron starred in a film called Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile. That movie was about the serial killer Ted Bundy, a far cry in subject matter from Efron’s new film, The Iron Claw (in theaters December 22). But The Iron Claw is so grim a wallow that it could credibly be called something like Extremely Sad, Shockingly Miserable and Cruel.
Written and directed by Sean Durkin (Martha Marcy May Marlene, The Nest), Iron Claw is about the real-life Von Erich family, a clan of professional wrestlers who rose to fame in that curious industry in the 1980s before falling apart amid one tragedy after another. The fate of several of Fritz Von Erich’s sons was so sprawling and dreadful, in fact, that Durkin has chosen to eliminate one whole brother’s woeful narrative to avoid overwhelming the film. Even with that omission, though, Iron Claw is subsumed by its litany of loss. It winds up becoming a mere list of sad things rather than a textured, affecting human drama.
Not for lack of well-intentioned trying, though. Every performer in the film is admirably committed to the emotional and physical challenges of the work. Efron, who has been on an interesting journey of career redefinition in the last decade, once again finds himself invigorated by darkness; he has consistently proven better at the heavier and edgier stuff than he was at the sparkle. To play Kevin, the one-time golden boy of the family, Efron has bulked up to near alarming degree; he’s a thick and rippled column of sinew, as if the muscle is about to break through his skin. It’s almost body horror, a man so proud of his obviously wrong dimensions.
But Efron offsets that physical unease with a disarming kindness. Kevin is sweet and affable, charmingly boyish when on a date with his future wife, Pam (Lily James), and tender toward his brothers. Kevin manages the domineering and stubborn ministrations of Fritz (Holt McCallany) with respectful tact, and quietly absorbs the cool dismissals of his mother, Doris (Maura Tierney). Efron crafts a fine portrait of decency in a rough and ambitious world. But I’m not sure the characterization goes much beyond that.
This is more a problem of Durkin’s writing than Efron’s performance. Throughout the film, we watch as Kevin and his brothers—rising star David (Harris Dickinson), aspiring Olympian Kerry (Jeremy Allen White), sensitive kid Mike (Stanley Simons)—assert their love for one another, but we don’t really feel it. We don’t get to know the family much beyond these broad, declarative brushstrokes. Perhaps there was just so much to survey that depth and detail had to be eschewed. The trouble is, when the bad stuff does start happening—and then happens, again and again—it’s hard to grasp the central why of it all. Why is this family so doomed, so pained, so self-destructive and unhappy?
The film would argue that it’s about a crisis of masculinity, especially of this stoic strongman varietal. And, sure, that is certainly evident in the film—all this talk of what a man is supposed to do and be. Ahead of a funeral, Fritz sternly advises his sons to show no emotion at the gravesite. It’s terrible and telling. But it’s all rather generic, not specifically tethered to these individuals and their idiosyncrasies and interior lives.
It’s also disconnected from the theater of their career. Durkin takes a peculiar approach to professional wrestling: there are moments that make plain how much of it is a performance, but the film also insists on wrestling’s deadly serious stakes. That duality is probably true to life, but Durkin doesn’t successfully evoke the tension of the dichotomy—between the artifice that so governs the Von Erichs’ work and the intensity with which they approach it. The movie is about a family of showmen, and yet that creative streak, that flair for razzle-dazzle drama, is never present in The Iron Claw’s domestic scenes. It’s possible that these men’s lives were entirely compartmentalized in that way. Yet the movie behaves like a film not about entertainers, but about soldiers, harrowed by war.
Maybe for the Von Erichs, life did feel akin to war; a profoundly unsettled psychology clearly plagued nearly all of them. Perhaps selfishly, one craves more explication of that fact, yearns for a movie that delves into particular nuances. The Iron Claw is starved of scenes in which these brothers interact with all the intimate detail of their bond. The film opts to tell us rather than show. And thus when its many hard hits arrive, it’s all too easy to remember that they’re only pretend.
