An Epic Light on Its Feet

At the height of his 1960s troubles, when as a conscientious objector he has refused induction into the Army, when he's been stripped of his title and not allowed to fight, someone asks Muhammad Ali if he even knows where Vietnam is. Sure, he replies. "It's on TV."

It is a cosmic moment in Ali, Michael Mann's sober and often stirring film biography, a perfect representation of the instinctive, almost visionary, shrewdness that lay beneath Ali's doggerel-spewing, hyperkinetic image. Bloodied and staggering under the blows of coarsely baying public opinion, he understood before most of us did that it was another kind of imagery--that selected by the media to symbolize the war to American civilians--that would determine the war's outcome and his own fate.

He probably could not then or even now explain his almost mystical connection with America's unofficial psyche: that best part of us that silently, often humorously, resists all the political and journalistic attempts to explain us to ourselves.

Perhaps the best thing about Mann's film (which he co-wrote with four others) is that it does not impose conventional motivations on Ali. It just lets him be, without a lot of back story or psychologizing. We don't learn, for example, exactly why he turned on Malcolm X, who had mentored him in Muslimism; we just suddenly see him do so. We don't know exactly what he and Howard Cosell saw in each other; we just see him and the sportscaster (Jon Voight in some rather grotesque makeup) juking and jiving--playing their own mutually advantageous game while the rest of the media stumble cluelessly in their wake. Ali was rope-a-doping the world long before he applied the technique to George Foreman in Zaire.

The film, like all biopics, can give only an impression of its subject's life. And so it elides much of Ali's busy romantic history (three relationships stand in for many), and we get a pretty fragmented sense of how he managed (or didn't) his slippery, fractious entourage. There are times when the film makes us hunger for more (or at least better connected) information. There are times in Will Smith's performance when you wish he would be a little less conscientious in his imitation of life, a little more, well, yes, instinctive in his performance. And Mann's reconstruction of the Rumble in the Jungle with Foreman can't match the lunatic intensity of Leon Gast's great documentary on the subject, When We Were Kings.

But still, there is also great sweetness and appeal in Smith's work; the supporting cast, led by Jamie Foxx's Drew (Bundini) Brown, is strong and real. The boxing sequences are superbly directed by Mann and ferociously enacted by Smith and a variety of sparring partners. And maybe the slight air of cautiousness that clings to this very conscientious film is a good thing. It does not brutally impose itself on the audience as so many big, riskily expensive films do. It permits us, in the audience, our own reflections not only about its subject but also about the times Ali helped shape and which ultimately, quite miraculously, helped shape him. A thoughtful epic is both a rarity and an oxymoron. But that's what Ali is, and you can't help being drawn sympathetically into its hero's struggle for mastery of himself and his era.