Cinderella Man (2005): Gender, Genre, and the Great Depression

Introduction: Reuniting the A Beautiful Mind Team

The 2005 film Cinderella Man reunites the team of director Ron Howard, screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, and leading man Russell Crowe, who had worked together four years earlier on the Oscar-winning A Beautiful Mind. On the surface, the two projects could not seem more different. In A Beautiful Mind, Crowe plays John Nash, a bespectacled Princeton professor with paranoid schizophrenia and a Nobel Prize in economics; in Cinderella Man, he plays Depression-era heavyweight boxing champion James J. Braddock, who had been dubbed "Cinderella Man" in the newspaper columns of the raffish Guys and Dolls scribe Damon Runyon, who also supplies the film's epigraph.

Although the film was widely praised by critics and was nominated for three Oscars — for editing, makeup, and for Paul Giamatti as Best Actor in a Supporting Role playing Braddock's trainer Joe Gould — Cinderella Man underperformed at the box office on its original 2005 release. The film's domestic gross came in some twenty million dollars below its budget. Yet the Depression-era setting has since become all too relevant: one gets the sense that had it been released a few years later, it would have found an audience far more receptive to a depiction of domestic hardship during an economic downturn.

This observation also leads to a realization: since Cinderella Man predates the later economic crisis, it was not that topical urgency that drew Crowe, Goldsman, and Howard to this story. So if they were not primarily making a film about life during a depression, what kind of film did they think they were making? There are several answers. Cinderella Man straddles genres effectively: it is a solid entry in the established tradition of the boxing film, alongside Scorsese's Raging Bull (1980) and Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby (2004), while also functioning as a lavish period costume drama and a genuinely affecting domestic story. The fact that Million Dollar Baby won the Best Picture Oscar the year before Cinderella Man was released very likely influenced the decision to make the film. Eastwood's twist on the boxing genre was to make the boxer a woman and to foreground gender difference — an approach that seems to have inspired the gender-related dimensions of Cinderella Man.

The Fairy-Tale Title and Its Thematic Significance

To a large degree, the answer to what kind of film Howard, Crowe, and Goldsman were making as their follow-up to their 2001 Oscar winner is held in the title itself. "Cinderella Man" is an odd and paradoxical title, and it may well have contributed to the film's failure to attract audiences despite favorable reviews. It scores a rating of 80% on the Tomatometer at RottenTomatoes.com, based on a survey of contemporary critical opinion. But the title is also the film's central interpretive clue, because it encapsulates the fairy-tale nature of the story.

Screenwriter Goldsman makes constant reference to this fairy-tale dimension in the script — used to especially powerful effect when Braddock's opponent for the film's climactic boxing match, Max Baer, turns it into a threat, growling, "People die in fairy tales, too." Director Howard reinforces the theme visually: a framed image of Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf is glimpsed as a decoration in the makeshift "Hooverville" shelters occupied by New York's displaced poor, a detail never commented upon in the dialogue. The Cinderella story of Cinderella Man is the fairy tale in which one man can use love, courage, and determination to find success against overwhelming odds.

Yet the confusion of genders encoded in the title also points to the film's central tension. Braddock's wife Mae, played by Renée Zellweger, cannot abide the violence of the boxing ring and never attends her husband's fights. The relationship between them, however, is utterly sweet and devoid of menace. Where Scorsese's Raging Bull coolly depicts its protagonist brutally beating his own wife, Cinderella Man raises the specter of domestic violence only through a subplot involving Paddy Considine as Braddock's friend and fellow stevedore, who raises a hand to his wife while drunk but later insists, sober, that he would never hit her. No similar assurance is needed for Braddock, because Crowe plays him as strong yet sensitive, and as a devoted family man.

Domestic Life, Gender Roles, and the Braddock Marriage

Howard constructs a sharp moral contrast between Braddock and the film's chief antagonist, heavyweight champion Max Baer, played by Craig Bierko as a kind of violent and self-infatuated clown. Baer is first glimpsed in a hotel room, clad in a silk robe while entertaining more than one young woman. This image is structured as a deliberate contrast to the film's opening prologue sequence, which shows Braddock at the height of his earlier career: returning home from a fight, Mae playfully quizzes him about whether attractive women had been flirting with him after his victory. The film presents Braddock as a man with no interest in such temptations. Indeed, the only time he becomes angry with Mae is when she fails to consult him before removing their children from their cold apartment — sending them to stay with relatives because Braddock cannot afford to pay the heating bill.

This scene of domestic conflict is crucial to the film's thematic architecture. Howard uses it to establish that Braddock's primary identity is that of a provider and a father. His fury at Mae is not the rage of a man who wants control over his wife; it is the rage of a man whose sense of self-worth is bound up in his ability to care for his family. The boxing ring, in this light, is less a stage for masculine glory than an economic instrument — a means of keeping the family together and the heating on.