36) Tyson

Tyson (2008)

Director: James Toback

Starring: Mike Tyson


Tyson is a film which didn't really get a great deal of promotion out here. That's not overly surprising given it's a documentary, or at least a documentary made by someone other than Michael Moore. But despite that, at least from where I was sitting, it was one of the best reviewed films of last year. I read a number of glowing reviews of the film, so when I saw it on sale at JB Hi-Fi the other week I thought I'd give it a go.

In a series of detailed interviews Mike Tyson talks about his life, from being an insecure kid growing up in poverty, his meteoric rise to become one of the youngest heavyweight champions in history, and then his spectacular implosion in which he lost everything.

While watching this film, my natural point of comparison was Leon Gast's Oscar winning When We Were Kings, a brilliant documentary about Mohammad Ali and the famous Rumble in the Jungle. While Gast's film was blatant hero worship of Ali, interviewing those around him to gain insight into what made him such an inspiring, admirable figure, Toback has a very different purpose and thus makes a very different film. Toback does not idealise Tyson. He condone the mistakes Tyson has made, but at the same time he does not condemn him for them. Rather he simply provides a space in which Tyson can speak.

What you get here is Mike Tyson's side of the story. Tyson is the only person who is directly interviewed for the film, the rest is archival footage, either news footage or fight footage. Given that it is his side of the story you don't necessarily take what he says as gospel, but none the less it makes for intriguing viewing. Tyson is a man who we only tend to hear from in short sound bytes, like the famous "I want to eat his children" jibe prior to his fight with Lennox Lewis, so it is interesting to see Tyson given an opportunity to try and explain himself. To his credit, Tyson is amazingly candid, being open and honest in a way we've never seen before. No topic is off limits. He speaks openly about his issues with sex, drugs, promiscuity, alcohol, about his time in jail, and his attitude towards boxing. We get insight into his incredible insecurities. Insecurities which contributed equally to his rise and fall. He gets quite emotional at times, particularly when talking about his now deceased trainer/mentor/father-figure Cus D'Amato.

When you build a film around a talking head interview you run the risk of it getting visually quite boring. But Toback doesn't resign himself to thinking that the talking head shots are the visually dull bits between the more interesting archival footage. Rather, he uses his camera and editing in a really interesting fashion to really enhance the power of what we are hearing from Tyson. He uses a lot of extreme close ups, allowing us to glean a lot from Tyson's facial expressions and especially his eyes. He also splits the screen up between different camera angles and layers the different bits of vision and audio over each other. It takes a while to get used to it at the beginning of the film, but it really emphasises this jumbled, uncertain way in which Tyson is thinking and talking.

Mike Tyson is one of the truly tragic figures of our time. He was an incredibly gifted athlete who had a meteoric rise to super stardom from very humble beginnings, but was unable to handle the pressures of fame and his fall was just as spectacular as his rise. The ferociousness that made him such an intimidating fighter in his prime spilled into his everyday life and destroyed him. What really makes this film though is how painfully self-aware Tyson is. If you can put aside your prejudices for a moment, Tyson is a very interesting film indeed.