I don’t mean to alarm or surprise you, but The Iron Claw is not a happy movie. From stem to stern, there is little but the pain, cruelty, and suffering inflicted on the Von Erich boys by their patriarch. Fritz (Holt McAllany), a professional wrestling mogul, is a real son of a bitch. Without emotion, empathy, or care beyond his own ambition and success, he throws his children’s lives, one after the other, at the industry that may be the only thing he loves. If he even loves that.
Though cruelty is often what’s on display, The Iron Claw has settled in as a film about love, concerned with its absence and the ways it perseveres in spite of obstacles, a flower through concrete. The brothers love each other deeply, and that love is evident.
I keep thinking about an early moment, when middle brother Kerry (Jeremy Allan White) returns home from Olympic training. The Carter Administration’s boycott of the Moscow games put an end to his chances of escaping the Von Erich black hole. In retrospect, this is the moment everything goes wrong.
When Kerry gets off the bus, the family is waiting for him. For some reason, I was struck by the lack of friends or neighbors. There is no one outside the family unit. In this movie, there seldom is. Fritz comes up first, and shakes Kerry’s hand. Father makes no motion to comfort son. There’s no indication that these two have ever, in their lives, hugged. The first words Kerry says are, “I’m sorry, dad,” locking eyes with Fritz and accepting, somehow, a responsibility that isn’t his. “I’m sorry, too,” Fritz answers.
Then, Kerry is mobbed by all three of his brothers. Instantly, they are laughing, smiling, and hugging each other. Now that I think about it, that hug, which I think is the only time we see the four living brothers embrace (a fifth brother died as a child), is mirrored by the end of the movie, when Kerry meets and embraces his three deceased siblings in the afterlife.
The happiest moments in the film—the only happy moments in the film—happen away from the family house, away from the wrestling ring, and away from Fritz. When youngest brother Mike (Stanley Simons) is denied permission to play at a college party with his high school band, all four brothers sneak out. At the party, we see them relax into full people. Kerry is a born partier. Kevin (Zac Efron) has sex for the first time, with the woman he goes on to marry. Mike sings and plays guitar in his band, who are pretty good. All four brothers can still find joy in the world. You think about that scene later, and you wonder what would have happened to all of them if they’d simply never gone back home.
There’s a pretty good lyric in the song Mike sings, by the way. “I’m a roman candle, waiting for the 4th of July.” Something like that. The Von Erich brothers could have been other people away from all this. Wrestling is all they’re allowed to know, rather than all they want to know.
Much of The Iron Claw is claustrophobic, shot with tight framing. Even when the wrestling matches do go to a wide, the boundaries of the ring feel like the end of everything. The movie is about space and the absence thereof as much as it is about love. Another way to say that: the movie is painfully aware of how those two things are related.
After David (Harris Dickinson) dies in a hotel room in Japan, on the night of the funeral, Fritz flips a coin to see which of his sons will take over David’s odyssean task, winning the World Heavyweight Championship. Kerry is not only selected, but succeeds, in a match that’s kept off screen. We aren’t invited to the joy or triumph of the accomplishment. We find out late at night, when Kerry is back home, sitting at the kitchen table with his belt and a beer. “I’m having a hard time coming down,” he says. He gets on his motorcycle and rides off into the night. Even the open road is shot claustrophobically. It doesn’t lead anywhere. It stretches out ahead infinitely, a narrow corridor, bound in on both sides.
In the final scene, with David, Mike, and Kerry dead, Kevin starts crying as he sits in the yard with his two young children. He’s sold the family business, in spite of Fritz’s wishes, and gotten away from wrestling. The boys ask what’s wrong. “I used to be a brother, and now I’m not a brother anymore,” is his crushing answer. His sons climb into his lap, “We’ll be your brothers,” and give him the first group hug he’s gotten since Kerry’s homecoming. The camera lifts up on a crane, and a subtle dolly zoom adds depth to the surrounding forest. Suddenly, there is space in the world. You can see beyond the edges of the ring.