Outside of New York and Los Angeles, Hollywood films love no American city more than Boston. The New England area seems to show up a lot around Fall Movie Season, a favored symbol of American nobility in film and drama. The city’s sins and graces – its blatant contradictions – seem to make it a perfect setting for white male unrest. Stronger takes along that baggage and then some. The film is about Jeff Bauman, the most high-profile victim of the 2013 bombing at the Boston Marathon. In the explosion, Bauman lost both of his legs right above the knee and was brought up as a symbol of “Boston Strong”, a testament to the city’s fierce demeanor in the face of terror. Director David Gordon Green, like many other filmmakers, makes the location an active participant in the story, only he and screenwriter John Pollono aren’t as interested in playing into the mythology. Instead, they see the city participate in Bauman’s trauma and eventual exploitation.
Bauman is played by Jake Gyllenhaal, who is unsurprisingly fantastic in a performance that is equal parts physical and emotional. Gyllenhaal is a reluctant movie star, but this is the kind of performance that shows that he is one of the best we have, and almost erases the oddity that was his performance in Okja from earlier this year. He plays Jeff as an easy-going, easy-living everyman who works at Costco and watched every Red Sox game in his “lucky chair” with his “lucky beer”. His ex-girlfriend, Erin (Tatiana Maslany), has long been fed up with Jeff’s lazy attitude toward commitment, but that hasn’t stopped Jeff from trying to win her back. When he finds out that she’s going to be running in the Boston Marathon, he makes a point to hand-draw a sign and show up at the finish line to prove to her that he can be the reliable man she deserves. And then the bomb goes off.
As Jeff is wheeled to an ambulance, a picture is taken which goes on to become the most iconic image of the event. It’s Jeff in a wheelchair, the bloody tendrils that remain of his legs on full display in the picture’s bottom half. He becomes a news story. His entire family, including his alcoholic mother Patty (Miranda Richardson), visits him in the hospital. When he wakes up, he tells the FBI that he saw the bomber. Within a week both of the suspects have been taken down. Jeff takes the news of his legs with surprising grace, making jokes about Lt. Dan from Forrest Gump, but when he returns home to the news and attention from a grateful Boston community, the reality of his situation becomes clear. Desperate, he begs Erin to not only take him back but to shepherd him through this process. The road is not easy, as doctors and physical therapists attempt to place him into a pair of new mechanical legs.
At its core, Stronger is a film about a man who didn’t truly appreciate is anonymity until he didn’t have it anymore. Bauman’s journey from baseball-obsessed slacker to legless hero was so sudden and without transition that it leaves him without purpose. The pressure of living up to “Boston Strong”, as well as continuing to support his family who wolfishly goes after the attention that the media gives, eats away at him. His only moments of peace come with Erin, who shows shocking selflessness in supporting her on-again, off-again romance with Jeff. This dedication meets its breaking point when her quest for Jeff’s best interest begins to rub up against Patty’s cravings for Jeff’s lionization. This is similar to the main drama dynamic within David O. Russell’s film The Fighter, but Stronger is a much more compelling display of that push and pull, and a film much less prone to melodrama.
Green and Pollono make Stronger a love story, banking on the chemistry between Gyllenhaal and Maslany to sell the film’s heart, and the bet pays off. The two actors, both so good and so vulnerable, give performances of what love actually is: cleaning up messes, dealing with in-laws, showing the worst of yourself. The film is not interested in punchy romance lines; in a lot of ways it has moved way past that. The scenes between Gyllenhaal and Maslany simmer with a lived-in reality. We can believe this relationship with little backstory. Maslany, most known for her work on television’s Orphan Black, is playing the kind of supportive wife type that’s all-too-common for actresses of her age and fame level, but she makes the most of it, giving this kind of hackneyed role some pep. As for Gyllenhaal, we’ve known for years that he’s one of the best, an actor of range and talent, not usually willing to take on the kind of sentimentality that comes with a role like Jeff Bauman. When he does, he does so with full commitment and one of the greatest movie star turns of his career.
The film is based on Bauman’s own best-selling book. David Gordon Green’s adaptation is both a tribute and a dissection, a movie that both values and redefines the certain type of Boston Man that Bauman was and now is. Jeff’s arc through Stronger is never heading toward enlightenment. Instead, Jeff wants to find calm and normalcy. He wants to be the man chanting “Boston Strong”, not the face of it. Green, a prolific, up-and-down filmmaker whose talent is some times undermined by a strange servility toward Danny McBride, shows here that he is still the director who showed so much promise with the wistful indies George Washington and All The Real Girls. I don’t know if Stronger really captures what Bauman was like as a man, but it does brilliantly focus on what it’s like for a man to suddenly have to carry the burden of a city.
Directed by David Gordon Green