There are certain film festivals that serve as on-ramps to Oscar season. Toronto, which happened earlier this month, is one of them, and “Stronger,” which opened this weekend, premièred there, and edged its way into the traffic of buzz. In particular, its star, Jake Gyllenhaal, is already being discussed as a plausible Best Actor nominee for his performance as Jeff Bauman, the real-life Costco employee who lost both his legs in above-the-knee amputations owing to wounds from the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing and who, during his rehabilitation, was thrust into a public role.
“Stronger” is filled with moments of sharp cinematic invention, thanks to its director, David Gordon Green, whose intentions often seem to conflict with the flatness of the movie’s script (written by John Pollono, based on Bauman’s memoir). The story’s action begins just before the marathon, when Jeff, twenty-eight, a self-described fuckup working indifferently as a Costco chicken roaster and living with his mother, Patty (Miranda Richardson), hopes to win back his ex-girlfriend, Erin (Tatiana Maslany), a hospital administrator who’s running the marathon for charity. He’s at the finish line to cheer Erin on when the bombs go off.
The movie’s high point of cinematic imagination comes early in the action, when, soon after Jeff’s surgery, nurses come to his hospital bed to change the dressings on his wounds. Green views it with meticulous, quasi-documentary attention in a single take, from behind Jeff, with the side of his face in the foreground and in focus and his bandaged stumps in the background and out of focus. The nurses give him a dose of medicine, but, as they begin to work on his legs, it hardly helps, and he gasps, jerks, grimaces, and writhes in gestures of small precision but agonizing impact. Then Erin, who’s in the room, appears, edging into the left side of the frame, also in focus, quietly shocked by the intensity of Jeff’s pain. The unbandaging of the right stump is hard enough; the one of the left proves unbearable. Only then does Green change angles—showing Jeff’s face as he ducks out of full view to vomit.
Throughout the movie, Green places noteworthy emphasis on such sharply significant physical details. Jeff’s family has to lift him and his wheelchair up the staircase of the apartment building in which he and his mother live—eventually, Jeff descends those stairs by himself, painfully, on his stumps. When Jeff hears his alarm clock in the morning, he tries to get out of bed and falls flat on his face. When he goes to the bathroom, he slips off the toilet while reaching for toilet paper; in another bathroom scene, Erin finds him in the bathtub, washing off the excrement that he’s smeared with. But there’s another side to Jeff’s injuries that the movie leaves out entirely: the mental trauma that goes along with the physical one. Jeff’s mood swings and outbursts suggest that, even if he wasn’t suffering from P.T.S.D., he, in any case, would have been helped by therapy. Were the movie to pay proper attention to his voice, it would pay close attention to his private emotions and experiences. Instead, true to the hoariest Hollywood conventions, “Stronger” thrusts the dramatic emphasis on his relationships. Though the center of the action is Jeff’s effort to restore his relationship with Erin, who eventually moves in with him and puts her career on hold to care for him, the movie’s crucial dramatic arc involves Jeff’s acceptance of his symbolic role, the public role that was thrust upon him as a result of the attack.
During his rehabilitation, Jeff is pursued by journalists and photographers. Oprah Winfrey wants him on her show; he’s invited to throw out a first pitch at Fenway Park. He can’t go to a bar without becoming the center of attention and the center of strangers’ selfies, and he looks derisively at his own lionization. On the drive home from the hospital, when he sees crowds of people dangling banners with such slogans as “Boston Strong, Bauman Strong,” he says, “I’m a hero for standing there and getting my legs blown off?” Eventually, though, Jeff discovers that his own symbolic role in the public eye packs healing power, and, as a result, he overcomes his doubts and his diffidence and embraces that role—as proven by the existence of his book and of the movie itself, which the real Bauman helped to make. Meanwhile, as he learns that he can do good just by being himself, he ends up doing himself some good as well, triumphing over the torments and the emotional turmoil that are impeding his relationship with Erin.
The very subject of “Stronger” is the fear of demagogy—of unfairly pursuing unwarranted adulation. It’s the subject of the moment, the subject of “Mother!,” and the lifelong theme of one of Hollywood’s artistic heroes, Clint Eastwood. Jeff is a sort of Eastwoodian hero whose place in the public eye is unwanted. As with the protagonist of Eastwood’s “Sully,” there’s an element of tragedy built into Jeff’s publicity—though in Eastwood’s film the tragic element dominates, with the emphasis on the pilot’s inner life, his haunted visions of all that could have gone wrong as he sought to save his plane and his passengers. In “Stronger,” by contrast, the script simplifies and flattens Jeff’s inner life, and that narrowing is among the movie’s more troubling aspects.
That’s where the casting of Gyllenhaal presents a paradox—the decision to employ Gyllenhaal, an able-bodied actor, to play Jeff has received criticism. One of the most telling critiques is centered on an extraordinary fact: as of 2015, fourteen of the previous twenty-seven Best Actor Oscar winners were able-bodied actors who played disabled characters. The dearth of disabled actors in prominent roles is rendered all the more troubling in “Stronger” by the fact that the movie’s most powerful moments involve not the psychology of disability but its physical aspects, something that a disabled actor would be better equipped to convey.
Though Gyllenhaal brings noteworthy physical aplomb to his embodiment of Jeff, the aspect of his artistry that’s most conspicuous is dramatic, and that’s exactly where Green’s artistry dwindles and falters. Gyllenhaal’s performance offers a conspicuous display of formidable skill within the film’s familiar range of conventional drama. There’s a scene that takes place in a car, a showdown-like confrontation in which Jeff’s pent-up frustrations break out with an explosive force, that raises the roof as in any Hollywood movie and suddenly decrescendos to a quietly cutting line that plays like a hairpin-turn display of acting-school virtuosity. It’s impressive rather than moving.
Disabled actors working in roles that aren’t far from their personal experience have a noble cinematic pedigree. Harold Russell, who lost his hands in a training accident while serving in the Army during the Second World War, played a disabled veteran in William Wyler’s vast, intimate historic drama “The Best Years of Our Lives” (and won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for it). For that matter, it’s easy to imagine Bauman himself, who’s an engaging and lively presence on TV, playing his own role in “Stronger.” But for such audacities we’ll have to turn to an even more daring and original director than Green: Eastwood, whose forthcoming film, “The 15:17 to Paris,” about three young American men who thwarted a terrorist attack on a European train in 2015, will star the real-life men, Alek Skarlatos, Spencer Stone, and Anthony Sadler, as themselves.
