About the movie
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A prize fighter’s greatest match: Himself
The documentary "Tyson" confirms that Iron Mike was a fearsome champion and a seriously messed-up dude.
The lone, unimpeachable source of this information is Tyson himself - the movie is a long extended interview with the fighter, conducted by filmmaker and friend James Toback, who simply turned a camera on his subject and let tape roll.
The movie includes footage of Tyson destroying a series of champs and contenders, reminding us why he was the dying sport's last great heavyweight icon. Once you saw a Tyson punch you, never forgot it - he planted his feet and leveraged a power that seemed to flow straight from the earth, through his massive trunk and into the chin of some hapless opponent.
Mike confesses that he liked to hurt people; that's no bulletin. More surprising is the way Tyson reveals his own fear, something he carried with him his whole life, growing up fatherless, abandoned to the Brooklyn streets by a mother who let him fight his own battles.
Tyson talks of suffering childhood beatings, the source of the gnawing fear that he learned to convert to predatory rage - he was less afraid when he was beating on somebody else, and he talks about the transformative experience of winning his first street fight.
He became a teen hoodlum sent upstate to a reform school where he learned to fight in a ring, under the guidances of trainer Cus D'Amato. Tyson cries openly when he talks about D'Amato, a father figure who taught him to fight, who helped him attain some modicum of maturity, then died leaving Tyson to the notoriously wolfish exploiters of the boxing world.
Tyson is candid in describing his appetite for the byp[roducts of boxing success - he consumed women and drugs in huge quantities. And he's hair-raising on the subject of women.
Amateur psychoanalysts will have a field day with this testimony, especially since it follows revealing descriptions of his childhood. Tyson describes his mother as "promiscuous," one adjective you won't find as you prowl the Hallmark stacks this week. One wonders what sort of incident inspired the confused mixture of desire, affection and loathing that marks his interaction with the opposite sex.
Tyson has mixed words for ex-wife Robin Givens, and vile things to say about Desiree Washington, who accused him of rape, a crime for which he was convicted and served time.
The movie is a useful portrait of a mentally tortured man, but I'm not sure it documents anything definitively biographical about Tyson.
Tyson may be said to offer his versions of the truth (a point Toback drives home with fractured and split screens), but his POV is so clearly distorted by self-deception that all "facts" melt away save one:
He sure could throw a punch. *
Produced by James Toback, Damon B*ngham, d*rected by James Toback, mus*c by Nas.
