Critics reviews

The word that seems to crop up most often in the course of the film is "rhythm," and Wiseman fills the screen with it. His eye for the diverse rites of training—whether it's pounding the heavy bag, jumping rope, or practicing footwork, slugging tires with a sledgehammer or tattooing the speed bag—highlights their contrapuntal choreography. Wiseman captures these staccato polyrhythms both visually and sonically.

The greatest ambassador for this much-maligned sport, at least in the first installment of Anthology's sparring-in-cinema series, is unquestionably Richard Lord, the owner of the no-frills establishment in Austin featured in the trance-inducing documentary Boxing Gym (2010). The goateed, extravagantly rat-tailed former super-featherweight contender practices footwork in the ring with a few of his clients, his incantatory words to them just one element of the film's constant rhythms.

What overwhelms is a shared sense of discipline, a distinctly American ideal of losing oneself in work, no matter what it is. Wiseman presents in BOXING GYM practitioners of the ideal from a variety of ethnic and class backgrounds; however, there's nothing at all self-conscious about the melting-pot tableau.

This kind of fly-on-the-wall style of documentary can create a sense that you're watching the unmediated truth, a fantasy belied by every camera position and each edit. He might be quieter than Michael Moore (literally and cinematically), who throws everything (found footage, interviews, himself) at the screen, but Mr. Wiseman says plenty in his work...

Considering that dedication to repetition is its primary theme, Gym impressively encompasses the sheer variety of talents, personalities, and ages (including infants) comprising the communal character of this sweaty microcosm.

Wiseman withholds an actual match until the movie's final minutes, and it's a shock when it comes. However sporting, the slugfest is primitive enough to restore every doubt you might have harbored about the sweet science, but repressed during the course of the film; the adversaries are no longer mastering themselves but inflicting pain on each other.

Like an elaborate dance, the fight [at the end of the film] functions as a beautiful amalgamation of the various drills that we have witnessed throughout the film, and we are able to recognize and appreciate the deftness of the hands and the lightness of the feet. On the other hand, after becoming used to the repetition of training and exercise, the idea of people pitting those familiar movements against one another is once again novel.

With this emphasis on the body, Boxing Gym dovetails nicely with last year's La Danse, which Wiseman made in between the shooting and editing of the new film... [But] La Danse is the more grueling film, a document of process that matches Meat in its pulverizing cadences and machine-like repetitions. Boxing Gym is, paradoxically, more of a dance film, an elegant, hypnotic document of pure physicality that abstracts the subject of boxing into a constant throb of balletic motion.

Wiseman isolates some of the key elements of boxing and focuses on each in turn, from footwork to strengthening exercises to mental discipline to learning how to punch... But unlike in La Danse, which left me with a heightened appreciation of the art form as well as the institution that houses it, the component parts we see here never coalesce into an illuminating portrait of the sport.

If this concise look at a meeting place for people hoping to better themselves — or regain past glories — isn't a complete KO, it's because you can wring only so much from footage of people pummeling punching bags and sparring in the ring. But average Wisemania is still a weight class above the work of most doc-makers, and the way he keeps circling back to the testing of physical limits offers an intriguing look at the spiritual need to sweat it out.

Spending more time documenting training drills than actual fights, the director keeps his camera fixed on the hypnotic rhythms that develop from the repetition of duck-and-punch exercises, fighters maneuvering shoulders and feet in a ring corner, and the relentless assault of fists on punching bags... These displays of human suppleness help stake out a distinctive space that Wiseman vividly brings to life.

I have the feeling that if this movie was projected out of focus in either slow motion or sped up it would be a fantastic experience. Emphasis on movement and color, the condensed, mirrored space of the gym swathed and blurred into a mass, the monotony of the film abstracted into jerkily dancing color and patchy fields of muscle.