Tyson (2008)

Director:

James Toback

Writer:

James Toback (writer)

Release Date:

27 March 2009 (UK)

Genre:

Documentary | Sport

Tagline:

The man. The legend. The truth.

Plot:

A mixture of original interviews and archival footage and photographs sheds light on the life experiences of Mike Tyson. |

Plot Keywords:

Mike Tyson | Boxer | One Word Title | Boxing | Character Name In Title

Awards:

1 win

Cast

Trevor Berbick	...	Himself (archive footage)
William Cayton	...	Himself (archive footage)
Cus D'Amato	...	Himself (archive footage)
James 'Buster' Douglas	...	Himself (archive footage)
Robin Givens	...	Herself (archive footage)
Evander Holyfield	...	Himself (archive footage)
Jim Jacobs	...	Himself (archive footage)
Don King	...	Himself (archive footage)
Monica Turner	...	Herself
Mike Tyson	...	Himself
Desiree Washington	...	Herself (archive footage)

MPAA:

Rated R for language including sexual references.

Runtime:

USA:90 min | France:90 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Certification:

USA:R | Portugal:M/12 | Iceland:12 | Finland:K-3 | New Zealand:R13 | Singapore:PG | Singapore:NC-16 (re-rating) | Singapore:M18 (DVD rating) | Australia:M | Canada:14A (Ontario)

Company:

Fyodor Productions

Trivia:

Director James Toback wanted to get Tyson talking while he was completing rehab, as he felt Tyson would be more clear-headed and willing to speak about some of his life's darker moments. Furthermore, Toback and Tyson had the understanding that no topic would be off limits, nor would Tyson have any say over what footage made the final cut.

Quotes:

Mike Tyson: A lot of my friends are dead, that um I grew up with, that aren't around anymore, or else in jail for the rest of their life, or else they really strung out on dope somewhere in Brooklyn, out of their head. Very few of them are still functioning adults right now. And but at that stage in my life it was exciting that it was like never gonna end.

Movie Connections:

References "Sesame Street" (1969)

no-holds-barred therapy session as much as biased documentary

I wouldn't want to be Mike Tyson, not in a million years or for a million dollars, at any stage of his life. He grew up on the mean, poor streets of Brooklyn, stole and robbed in his young teen years, got sent to Juvenile Hall and then was trained by Cus D'Amato, famous and talented boxing trainer, and then became a boxing machine in the ring only to see his self-confidence and inner demons take over him as he saw everything crumble around him. At least, that's what James Toback's film on Tyson would want us to believe, or have us hear him out on anyway.

What's clever, and most absorbing, about Tyson is that it doesn't ask us to see all of the truth in the facts in this man's life, but that there may be some truth in this man's own self-analysis. We get no other voice in the film to contradict or say otherwise what Tyson himself says in looking back (we see old videos of what other people have said about him, be it boxing announcers to the infamous interview Robin Givens gave to Barbara Walters with Tyson sitting next to her). He's not exactly a very "good" man even by his own estimation, but if there's one thing that he'd want to get out in the open, by his own admission, he's trying, Lord how he's trying.

The interviews, done as Mike Tyson was getting himself cleaned up of drugs and alcohol, are shot in the face-to-camera approach of Errol Morris, but there's another influence I wonder if Toback was tooling with which is Robert Altman. This may be the only documentary I can think of where the one and only interviewee's dialog and words overlap each other in most cases. This is very effective, such as when Tyson is talking about his time in prison for rape and we hear and see his various memories of the experience overlapping one another. This, plus a strongly edited split-screen effect, creates a kind of prism-vision of Mike Tyson in this very focused portrayal of the man, myth, legend himself.

It's self-confession and a history lesson. For someone who hasn't followed all of Tyson's career and personal life the former is put into good light. I learned almost all I needed to know about Tyson as a boxer from this film. As a human being that may be another matter. He is honest about himself, as if in a therapy session, but to what degree (even to his friend of 20 years, the director) is hard to say. But this only adds to the interest; how much his trainer's death in the mid 80s really had on him as a boxer is really hard to say, since he contradicts himself as saying he was never the same after his death, losing his already fragile self-confidence, while also becoming one of the dominant presences in boxing in the 20th century in the late 80s and early 90s.

What one gets from this film is something rare in documentary, which is no-BS bias. We get no other point of view but this subjective portrait, which is sometimes harsh on himself and sometimes, arguably, not harsh enough. For those who only know of the crazy-ass Tyson (i.e. "I'm gonna f*** you till you love me" quotes) one can see him open up on his own past of being so afraid and with such a lack of self-esteem that this profession he chose was the only logical way to go aside from death or in prison for longer than that of his rape conviction (which, true to subjective portrait, he still denies to this day).

It's not perfect as a documentary, and there are a couple of points I groaned inside from Toback's artistic choice, most notably the shots of Tyson walking on a beach at sunset with some poetry narration (that's right, Tyson breaking out the stanzas) that feel so against the hardcore personal nature of the rest of the picture. It's like we're all collective psychiatric interpreters of this incredibly flawed once-truly-great fighter, and at the least there's nothing else like it in boxing film history or just in theaters now in general. 9.5/10