“Ever since I was a child, people said my family was cursed. Mom tried to protect us with God. Dad tried to protect us with wrestling. He said if we were the toughest, the strongest, nothing could ever hurt us. I believed him. We all did.”
Kevin Von Erich (in The Iron Claw)
The Iron Claw is a perfect movie. A 10/10 phenomenon. Best movie of 2023.
Me watching this movie is proof that men cry too. This movie broke and rebuilt me, provoked feelings I haven’t felt in a long time, and unearthed memories that I haven’t thought about in years.
It shatters the ideal of traditional masculinity — the muscular facades, the dry-eyed masquerade. The performance that men often put on for the outside world while the world inside crumbles day after day. Taking blow after blow, the body can endure a lot, but look at the eyes of these characters. We witness an emotional journey through the eyes of the Von Erichs, a grand odyssey into their hearts without any exposition. The Iron Claw takes us on a Herculean epic path of men trying to achieve so much, putting all of their emotional, spiritual, and physical energy into their bodies, their success, their wrestling abilities, yet no matter how much they achieve they still cannot amount to anything in their father’s eyes.
There is a magic weaved throughout the film, a perfectly cast spell, that binds you to your seat as you behold the sweat, blood, and tears of the Von Erichs, fighting, bleeding, breaking for that elusive chance to dazzle their father once and for all. They bruise, bend, and split under the pressure. “A real man doesn’t cry” echoes in their ears, so they express themselves through weights, through battered limbs, black eyes, cocaine, graveyard visits, and empty success.
Sean Durkin, director, writer, and producer, created a film that could make even the toughest, most deadpan man shed a tear. It is a marvel of writing and emotive storytelling, understanding the sovereign concept of showing versus telling. Each scene holds your attention, communicates something crucial. The camera dances, the actors shine, and the direction perfectly calculates and balances every beat, every foreshadowed plot point, and every emotive turn. We feel the love, the heart, the chemistry, the tragedy, the disappointment, the resilience, the failure, and the raw masculinity of every moment with precise effect. The impact leaves you breathless, teary-eyed, choking on broken dreams and shallow promises.
A drama in its most glorious state, this movie will pull you into an experience of mythological proportions with the minute details of a Greek tragedy.
Watching this movie reminded me of a poem I once wrote that I thought perfectly encapsulated its idea, so I thought I would share it below:
The man was being beaten. He lay sprawled unnaturally, taking fist after fist. He offered no resistance.
He could stand if he wanted, he could run if he needed to. But he remained — accepting each brutal blow to his ribs.
Women watched, open-eyed. Why didn’t he escape?
But there was a murmur that only the men could hear, rippling louder and louder to a pitch that no others could catch. A secret channel that only a man could detect, a language that only a man could unravel. The words of their fathers: “be a man, be a man, be a man, be a man, be a man, you can take it, you can take it, be a man, be a man, be a man, you can take it, you can take it.”
The man lay, swollen and blue. His eyes searched the crowd. And suddenly he smiled a broken-tooth smile, “Look at me, pa! I’m a man.”