Michael Mann’s Strategy in the Ring With ‘Ali’

With the demise of Stanley Kubrick, Michael Mann has taken over as the reigning perfectionist of American movies. So talented is Mann that his invariably gritty and increasingly adult pictures have become events to rival sci-fi blockbusters.

This happens even when his movies showcase little-known stars in commercially risky ventures. Think of Daniel Day-Lewis in “The Last of the Mohicans” (1992), a historically savvy revival of frontier romance, and pre-”Gladiator” Russell Crowe in 1999’s “The Insider,” a muckraker about big tobacco and broadcasting.

Now, directing Will Smith in the title role of the new movie “Ali,” Mann might alter the common consciousness of one of America’s most popular heroes.

When Mann burst onto the scene 20 years ago with the vibrant and original genre movie “Thief” (1981), it was hard to tell how high he’d go into the movie stratosphere. After all, he followed “Thief” with the inert horror epic “The Keep” (1983)--then became better known as the co-creator of the pop TV phenomenon “Miami Vice.”

Despite his forbidding reputation, Mann has been, during the two decades I have known him, as approachable as he is intense and intelligent. Some directors cut off contact at the first mixed review. Mann, though, wrote me a cordial note after a lukewarm response to “Manhunter.”

Since then, he has become a major catalyst in American movies--courageous and unpredictable. “Ali,” which opened on Christmas, is his most ambitious effort yet. Here, his appetite for research jibes with his firsthand knowledge of pop myth-making. That one-two punch allows him to portray one of the most elusive and gigantic figures of our time without falling into generalities or hero worship.

His scholarship, Mann explained in a recent conversation at a New York hotel, “is not dry academic research.” He tries to pick up “sensory experiences” that stick in the memory of his actors--and audiences. And his devotion to the truth isn’t always literal.

When he scouted Ali’s house in Chicago, “the arches looked like a gothic church, completely wrong,” he said. “I’m sure Ali didn’t care, but to me the doorways looked anti-Islamic.” Instead, for Ali’s house, he used the house of the late Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad, which paid off in other ways.

Ali’s first wife, Sonji, was working next door. “The man who owns the house currently is this terrific Chicago attorney named Robert Bennett, who isn’t Islamic but is an old-time [civil rights] movement lawyer,” Mann said. So Smith and Mann “spent like an hour and a half talking with Sonji and with Bennett, who had been Elijah Muhammad’s attorney.”

Overall, “Ali” depicts Muhammad Ali as a boxing genius and an apolitical man in a politicized environment. The movie starts when he becomes a heavyweight champion by defeating Sonny Liston in 1964 and celebrates his victory at the Hampton House hotel with good friends, including Malcolm X. It comes into focus when Ali is stripped of his title because he refuses to be inducted into the Army at the time of the Vietnam War, and ends when he regains the crown by defeating George Foreman in 1974.

This isn’t a typical biopic. Most people don’t connect Ali with the explosion of black energy throughout our pop culture in the ‘60s. The movie starts by intercutting images of his boyhood, and his training for the Liston fight, with a Sam Cooke performance.

“He is a hero. He is a hero,” Mann said. “How did I come up with the structure? Out of desperation, the way I come up with any of these things. I can’t possibly bring you into this movie with some expository scene; I have to bring people as much as I can into Ali’s life.

“Here is the human condition of being a kid from the west side of Louisville [Ky.] in 1964. What’s your childhood memory? What’s the vivid experience you had as a 9-year-old that you can’t get out of your mind? When your dad takes his wallet out at night and puts it on the night stand next to his bed--how does he do it? What does your mom’s cooking smell like? All of that.

“You’re growing up in the de facto apartheid of the border South, which is confusing--more confusing than Alabama or Mississippi. Because you can’t drink from certain drinking fountains, but people are being real polite about it. And, by the way, across the river, you’re in the North. And you have a family that’s had problems with being educated and bright, and not being able to do anything because you are a colonized people inside your own country. You have an uncle who committed suicide, who was college-educated and a window-washer.

“So, how do you relate all of that but relate only the things that are required for the story in this film to progress? How do you hit the sensory experience and the self-knowledge of this 22-year-old guy in a very few minutes?

“To me,” Mann said, “the movie shows Ali in this arc of his career doing what he did in the Foreman fight--backing off at times, hanging on the ropes, and then coming into his own. Even in his opening scenes with his pal Malcolm X, he seems cagey, distant--doing the rope-a-dope--laying against the ropes to buy time and wear out his opponents.

“My intent was a little bit different. He decides to side with Elijah Muhammad against Malcolm. That’s why he says what he does when he bumps into Malcolm in a crowd--and this is all factual--’You shouldn’t have quarreled with Elijah Muhammad.’ He sided with the Nation of Islam. It’s a very cagey decision. And I think it’s instinctive, not cognitive.”

As for Ali’s painstaking pre-fight preparations, Mann explained: “He would prepare for a fight and study fight films more than any other fighter in history--study an opponent and study him and study him, and from that derive a fight plan that also had a psy ops [psychological operations] side to it, obviously. If he could make you angry at him, great, because if you’re angry at him, you’ve just abandoned your fight plan. Now you’re fighting his fight.”

A lot of the movie’s visual style appeared to flow from the fight scenes in which the camera seemed both specific and subjective.

“We learned about cutting off guys in the ring and tried to dramatize it,” Mann explained. “I wanted boxing to be fascinating and dramatic to people who don’t know about boxing and don’t care about boxing. It’s not two guys who get into the ring and whoever hits the hardest wins. That’s not boxing. Being hit hard and hitting is not on the minds of boxers.

“The issue is all the strategy and the tactics--quite complex, more complex than people know--and there’s a story to it. And what’s the story to the Liston fight, and how do we choreograph that to show what’s going on? And the facility, the fleetness of foot, the man who looks like a middleweight, and moves like a middleweight, and then you stand next to him and he’s 6 foot 2 and weighs 218 pounds. That was Sonny Liston’s experience. His experience was, ‘I can’t hit him, and he can hit me whenever he wants to. And they didn’t tell me the third thing: He hits hard.’ And at the end of Round 3, it’s, ‘I’ve lost this fight.’”

*

Michael Sragow is film critic for the Baltimore Sun, a Tribune company.