`People basically suck,” said Mike Tyson a few years back, when he was sitting on top of the world. “They’re always trying to screw you.”
Friday night, in the Indiana prison cell where he is serving a six-year sentence for raping Desiree Washington, Tyson will have a chance to see some of those who screwed him up, as his life unfolds in an incisive biographical portrait called “Fallen Champ: The Untold Story of Mike Tyson” (8 p.m., NBC-Ch. 5).
This is not the sort of exploitative piece one is used to seeing from the networks-no docudrama touches, no recreation flourishes. It’s a sad and sordid tale, filled with victims and villains, ample brutality and scant kindness. It’s a real-life drama better than most fiction.
In chronicling the career of the man many believe to be the greatest heavyweight fighter ever, director Barbara Kopple couldn’t help but stumble over some of the familiar dirty laundry Tyson dropped in a rush from the tough streets of Brooklyn to the heavyweight championship of the world and its attendant celebrity to, finally, prison.
But she brings a clear-eyed perspective to the story, and adds many fresh and telling details. As in her Oscar-winning documentaries about the labor movement, “Harlan County U.S.A.” and “American Dream,” Kopple uses no narration. There are only interviews and voice-overs with about 50 people interviewed for the film. And Kopple arranges them in and around a brisk chronological journey through Tyson’s life.
There are pals from his old Brooklyn neighborhood telling how he was called “Dirty Mike” because his clothes were always filthy; a caseworker at his first reformatory saying, “He was cocky and shy at the same time”; comments about Cus D’Amato, the boxing guru who molded the ferocious teenager; Jim Jacobs, Tyson’s former manager, saying, “He fights everybody like they stole something from him”; ex-wife Robin Givens describing their marriage as “torture-it’s been pure hell”; Tyson’s chauffeur, Rudy Gonzales, saying, “When a woman is handing you her underwear to give to my boss, we basically knew what they wanted”; and Washington’s father lamenting, “I want my little girl back.”
Some of the most revealing footage is of Tyson as a teenager living with D’Amato, who ran an informal boarding school for young fighters in upstate New York. Originally shot for German television-and intended to focus on another fighter-the footage gives us a look at a kid who, according to Teddy Atlas, Tyson’s trainer at the time, “was easily misled. He needs love. He needs confidence.”
That’s obvious in a shot of Tyson crying on Atlas’ shoulder before a bout.
But then Atlas tells of the time a teenage Tyson tried to force himself on a girl living near D’Amato’s camp. Atlas put a gun to the young boxer’s head and threatened to “blow his head off” unless Tyson changed his ways.
After that incident, D’Amato fired Atlas, the first in an increasing number of boys-will-be-boys indulgences that obviously convinced Tyson that he had a license to violate conventions and laws.
Although they appear frequently, neither Tyson nor Don King, his later self-interested promoter, was interviewed for this show. I’m glad. Neither could add to what’s there.
It might be understandable if one comes away from “Fallen Champ” feeling an uncomfortable compassion for the young man. There were so many pushing-or at least indulging-the young man’s darker urges; even after his conviction, there’s Louis Farrakhan chillingly trying to defend Tyson’s actions.
This brilliant film can’t help but elicit a reluctant sympathy for a life that was emotionally manhandled. But it does not let us forget the loathsome results.
– Trying now to mine the same historical territory as “Roots” and “The Civil War” is to find a vein almost played out. So familiar are the real events and so outsized the fictional characters, that even a writer of Alex Haley’s imagination and sensitivity cannot provide enough that is engagingly new, certainly not enough to fill six hours of television.
“Queen,” which comes in two-hour chunks at 8 p.m. Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday on CBS-Ch. 2, chronicles the life of Haley’s paternal grandmother. It does have its moments. But it also has overblown events and leaden characters in a melodrama more soap opera than historical saga.
Queen (played by Halle Berry) is the daughter born to a white plantation owner (Tim Daly) and one of his slaves (Jasmine Guy). Being of mixed parentage makes her life a mess. Freed after the Civil War, she is able to pass for white, but this eventually leads-through a number of mishaps including a brutal rape, abandonment by the father of her child, and an attempt by some religious kooks to steal her baby-to an identity crisis that lands her in a madhouse after a nervous breakdown.
Berry does her best with the gargantuan part. But she lacks the expressiveness and skill to keep us interested, just as the film lacks the historical sweep and social context in which to wrap its characters. As directed by John Erman, it’s a scattershot affair, skipping about without style or pace. The script by David Stevens is awash in cliches.
Supporting performances range from the outrageously hammy (Martin Sheen, as the plantation patriarch) to the stiff (Guy) to the nicely edgy (Patricia Clarkson, as the wife of Daly’s character) and, finally, to the sublime, in Danny Glover’s wonderfully steadfast Alec Haley, who marries Queen and sees her through her final ordeals.
Don’t believe the network hype. “Queen” is not the second coming of “Roots.” It’s just a pale shadow.
– A spoiled brat and would-be artist (Cecilia Peck) returns home to find her parents preparing to move from the family’s home. She decides to paint the two and, in so doing, gains a greater appreciation of their peculiarities and charms and their mutual affection, and thus gains a better understanding of herself.
That’s the thin, sappy little premise of “The Portrait” (7 p.m. Saturday, TNT), based loosely on Tina Howe’s play “Painting Churches.” And it could easily be dismissed were the parents not played by Gregory Peck and Lauren Bacall. Almost regal in appearance, Peck and Bacall make a wonderful pair, their every mannerism calculated toward winning our affection. Director Arthur Penn (“Bonnie and Clyde”) takes full advantage of his stars’ considerable charms.
In Brief: WTTW-Ch. 11, as if trying to show how to waste money, devotes an hour to “Nelson and Jeanette: America’s Singing Sweethearts” at 9 p.m. Friday. By almost any measure, Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald were a minor movie team. Although the show is nicely made, seeing clips from the pair’s eight (!) movies and listening to the less-than-riveting biographical details is to observe a documentary being made out of a footnote. . . . “Real Sex Five” (11 p.m. Saturday), the latest in HBO’s ongoing attempt to take the prurience out of sex on TV, introduces us to a troupe of traveling transvestite entertainers, a male Nobel laureate who teaches women the “art of masturbation,” a grandmother who runs one of Germany’s biggest sex paraphernalia businesses, and a couple who speak with outlandish candor about their fondness for bondage. . . . Dick Van Dyke is already getting tiresome as crime-solving doctor Mark Sloan, this time trying to prove that his former star student and lover (Suzanne Pleshette) is a murderous surgeon in “A Twist of the Knife” (8 p.m. Sunday, NBC-Ch. 5).
