EMPIRE AVENUE, PARK CITY
Would you knowingly choose to lock yourself in a room with Mike Tyson for 30 hours in the name of cinema?
I’m back in the warmth for a few brief moments before heading off to my next screening. Just moments ago I left a screening of “Tyson,” a brutally frank, no-holds barred documentary about the life of former world heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson. Winning standing ovations from the audience tonight as well as those at the Cannes film festival last May, this film definitely opens your eyes to the soul of a unique and frightening individual. From director James Toback, “Tyson” tracks the boxer’s career from his days as a teenage thief and drug dealer in Brooklyn, to undisputed world boxing champion, to his dramatic fall from grace and incarceration for rape. The film mixes archive footage with raw interviews Tyson himself. Through the course of the film, Tyson himself reveals how he lost more than $300m in the last few decades and once sought to conquer and possess the women in his life.
This film does a phenomenal job humanizing Tyson. While not the first film to do so, it’s certainly the first to really gain wide exposure and acceptance. Told entirely through Tyson’s own words, this film cuts deep into his persona, exposing a raw, no-holds-barred look at his own success and failure. More than once, Tyson even breaks down and cries on camera. This, my friends, is a unique window into an amazing character.
Following the film, Tyson and Tobeck took questions from the audience. Not surprisingly, most questions centered on Tyson’s own journey and not so much on the film itself. Tyson said he was actually quite “intimidated” by getting up in front of the audience tonight since he was so far out of his element. He stated that more than anything he was “working on being humble” and trying to be a better person who was finally at peace with the world. He had spent so much of his life being “afraid of failure” that he wasn’t even aware of who he’d become. “I was just a moral mess,” Tyson said, going on to talk about how it was “very hard to watch” the film because it meant that he had “become very vulnerable.” Speaking on the subject of his heyday as Heavyweight Champion, he said that he “became scared of that guy [on the screen].” “[At the time] I never understood why people looked at me and made those judgements against [my character].” It must be amazing to look at himself now in such a different light.
Even for those who aren’t into boxing (I’m not at all), this is still a pretty amazing film as a window into a larger-than-life character. It will no doubt find a large audience.
Glad I caught this film. Trying to get there from “Over the Hills and Far Away,” I quite literally had to throw myself on the hood of a taxi to make it in time. Shuttle busses were backed up or so full people were being crushed by the doors. I entered the theater with less than one minute left to spare.
~Gunther
