The Bronze is about Hope Annabelle Greggory, a former Bronze medalist gymnast who is going to seed living off the fumes of her former glory in a small town. Initially she is opposed to helping the town’s latest hope for greatness, but then she decides to use her skills to train a possible competitor for the town’s adulation and obliterate her only accomplishment.
I loved The Bronze. The Bronze reminded me of Bad Santa meets Joan Ryan’s Little Girls In Pretty Boxes: The Making & Breaking of Elite Gymnasts & Figure Skaters. The Bronze has a comedic tone, but I responded to it in the vein of an Adam Sandler movie (think Billy Madison meets Happy Gilmore) when he still made good movies except the drama was played straight, and the story seemed more realistic. The Bronze features an unlikeable character who is redeemed and changes when she finally embraces reality and cares about the people around her.
What makes her in need of redemption is her failure to treasure those who love her and her failure to live her life as fully as she did when she was able to compete in the Olympics. What makes Annabelle in need of redemption is not her sexuality, her foul-mouth, her competitiveness, her pride or her accomplishments. Indeed these traits are the ones that stay with her at the denouement and what made me interested in her character and invested in the story. I love how The Bronze took what is usually a male archetype, the male ex-athlete protagonist, made her female then heavily invested it in gendered behavior that we normally associate with masculine behavior, but in a female athlete. Her unwavering attitude and confidence as demonstrated by her physicality and her cursing made me root for her. We do not see enough women proud of their accomplishments without disclaimers or self-deprecation.
The Bronze also deals with the inequitable standards applied to female gymnasts: breasts are bad, be cute, don’t eat, no men. When we initially meet Hope, she is a mess: promiscuous and gluttonous, but as The Bronze unfolds, and her behavior seems less like self-medicating and more like living fully, Hope becomes a powerful rebuke to the industry that she embraced, and she can wield those tools to make champions or make happy human beings instead. She eventually chooses the latter. The Bronze is subversive in suggesting that getting the adulation of the world is not only dangerous, but should not be encouraged if you care about future generations. Hope transforms into someone broke from living in the past and insures that the future does not create more women who cannot live fully or will obey an industry that is inherently self-destructive and hates women’s bodies. The ultimate message of The Bronze is loyalty to yourself, to those you love and your neighbors.
After I watched The Bronze, I decided to see what other people thought of the movie. In a world where Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby is praised as a freewheeling satire, The Bronze is slammed for its abrasive main character and sex scenes. Movie critics, your male privilege is showing. I cannot recall reading a movie review that complained about a sex scene as confusing tonally. Do we just find sex scenes confusing and characters abrasive when they are sexually adventurous women? I am a sports atheist, but I preferred The Bronze to Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby because it felt more realistic and critical of sports culture than the latter, which simultaneously loves and ridicules it.
I automatically associate The Bronze with Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby because of Gary Cole, who plays the father in both films. I adore him. I am unfamiliar with Melissa Rauch, the writer and star of The Bronze, but I love her now. I enjoy Will Ferrell, but Rauch highlights the humor in the Midwestern traits without a sense of mean-spirited ridicule. Rauch plays Hope as a real person, not a caricature. Rauch does not suck all the oxygen out of the room while remaining center stage. I was excited to finally see Sebastian Stan as a character without angst.
I heartily recommend The Bronze as a drama with comedic undertones, but not to viewers who are sensitive to profanity or sexual scenes.