‘Christy’ lacks the depth the story deserves

Christy Salters’ life feels like it should be a movie. 

Her status as one of the most important figures in the early years of women’s boxing might have been enough. But Christy’s life outside of the ring has all the earmarks of the type of story that biopics love to tell: a story about a woman who finally came to terms with her sexuality, and who overcame a terrible relationship with her coach-turned-husband – over 20 years her senior, and emotionally, financially, and physically abusive throughout their marriage before he eventually attempted to murder her in 2010. 

“Christy,” the new film directed by David Michôd and co-written by Michôd and Mirrah Foulkes, rests on the inherent high drama of Christy’s story, refusing to engage with her beyond the surface, which leads to fairly surface level performances. Boxing is a performative sport to an extent, and the moments that play off that performativity in the ring can be enthralling. But it’s in the film’s quieter moments that it loses any sense of depth. 

We meet Christy (Sydney Sweeney) just before she begins boxing professionally, living with her conservative parents (Merritt Wever and Ethan Embry) and hiding a romantic relationship with a young woman named Rose (Jess Gabor). As her boxing career begins to heat up, she meets James Martin (Ben Foster), her manager and eventual husband. The movie follows Christy through this meeting to that fateful near-fatal night in 2010.  

The film covers roughly 20 years of Christy’s life and runs into the same problem that most biopics that opt to cover this much time run into – there’s a lot of telling, but not a lot of showing. “Christy” rolls by at a meandering, unfocused pace that gives the performances that same wandering, not quite of a piece feeling. 

Sweeney put in the work to capture a boxer’s physicality, and physically, she cuts quite an impressive figure. Christy had unbridled confidence in the ring, and Sweeney nails the more blustering aspects of her performance. When she’s punching, or trash talking, or sticking her tongue out lewdly at an opponent, she’s fun to watch. But while the movie seems to relish these boxing moments, the moments that deal with Christy’s private life are left wanting. And, outside of the ring, Sweeney doesn’t necessarily convey the hard, frayed edges that a person in Christy’s position might have. 

In one scene, one of Christy’s rivals, Lisa (Katy O’Brian) tells her good luck before a match. Christy responds with: “Good luck getting knocked the f*ck out.” Later, when Lisa asks why Christy responded with such hostility, Christy says she thought Lisa was only trying to get into her head. 

It makes sense that Christy – whose only experience of a relationship is wrapped up with fear and pain – would have a hard time trusting anyone. But this moment is a good example of the film telling us how Christy feels instead of showing us. The pain inherent in that lack of trust is hard to find in Sweeney’s performance in these quieter moments. She is quite good at playing loud, physical distress (a skill she shows off by the film’s end). But Sweeney is better at playing someone fully cracked open rather than showing the cracks as that person comes apart. 

As Christy’s mom, Wever delivers on the cruelty of faux Southern politeness, and O’Brian shines in her few moments as the only real source of warmth in the film. But for the most part, the script doesn’t do any of the actors many favors, particularly when it comes to the central relationship between James and Christy. When James first meets Christy, he is decidedly uninterested in becoming her coach, telling the man she’s sparring with to “break a rib, if you have to” – cruel and violent from the very start. 

But, from that moment on, there is no attempt to show us how the relationship between he and Christy grew into what it became. The movie moves through each part of their life together like an observer, choosing to simply tell the audience about different moments in time without providing much insight. Particularly toward the end of the film, there is a heavy, almost salacious emphasis on Christy’s distress that feels more sensationalized rather than a true attempt to understand her emotional state. 

There is a moment at the end of the film where Christy talks about how much of herself she lost throughout her relationship with James. But the fact that we never see that other side of Christy – the fact that we watch an entire movie and feel like we don’t really know her at all – makes what is meant to be a triumphant moment ring hollow. 

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