3.5 of 5 stars
""Tyson"" is a strange" surprising sports documentary. It's about as strange in fact as its subject which is really saying something.
Everyone remembers Mike Tyson for his precocious boxing ability his reputation for brutalizing women and his sweet tooth for the delicious earlobe of Evander Holyfield. What people forget about Tyson is his tough sadly touching childhood in east Brooklyn.
It can be assumed that a lot of people grow up underprivileged in America and that it negatively affects the rest of their lives as well. But Tyson's childhood can't be taken for granted. Listening to this human dump-truck reminisce about the first fight of his life when a neighborhood bully broke the neck of one of his beloved pet pigeons which seemed to be his only friends at the time it becomes clear that Tyson is trying to remind people that he's human.
We can criticize him for being a juvenile delinquent (he was arrested more than 30 times by the age of 13) or dismiss his boxing career as that of a vicious animal in the heat of blood lust but then again what does a childhood in the ghetto give you to work with?
It gave Tyson like it has given so many other angry scared young men" a quick punch. At the age of ten he was routinely ""humiliated in the street"" as he puts it with almost classical gravity. At 20, he was heavyweight champ. At 26 he was in a federal penitentiary on conviction of rape. At 30, heavyweight champ again. Tyson"" follows this history" which reeks of the absurd as if it were an existential nightmare of identity. And it's Tyson interestingly who is the first to identify the nightmare.
To highlight Tyson's identity crisis director James Toback gets adventurous on the cutting-room floor periodically fragmenting the interviews with three-way spit screens and audio overlaps. Tyson's recollections as a result are mashed up in a totally unique stream of consciousness that flows like the soupy brain pulp of a pro boxer.
Toback also calibrates the rhythm of his cuts to fit the archive footage of Tyson's lighting fast punches. It goes a long way to help one understand the psychology of fighting that Tyson speaks of often.
Non-judgmental cameras capture interviews with Tyson for the bulk of the movie aiding in his project of recasting himself as a man maligned. He speaks with his distinctive soft lisp recites poetry that isn't half bad and constantly puts his finger on the pulse of his life's story.
But none of it can mask the footage of his brutally homophobic public ranting or his eagerness to sling misogynistic insults at former lovers.
This curious combination of sensitivity and hateful pigheadedness gives the most honest moral impression of the man that's conceivable which is one of ambiguity and surprising versatility.
Contact the Diversions Editor at dive@unc.edu.
