TORONTO, Canada—Going into the premiere of Unstoppable, the real-life-inspired sports drama, Jennifer Lopez was the story. The star made her much buzzed-about return to the red carpet—and to the big screen—Friday night at the Toronto International Film Festival following a summer covered by tabloids and culminating in the announcement she was divorcing Ben Affleck.
Dressed in a metallic Tamara Ralph dress that was all a-glitter and accentuated with bows that hugged her bare legs like a present, she shone even when taking her seat in the dark. Lopez stars in and produced the film, along with Matt Damon and her once-again ex, Affleck. Damon was in attendance; Affleck was not.
But after the screening the attention was less focused on Lopez than it was on Anthony Robles, the real life subject who received an emphatic standing ovation
This year the TIFF lineup is awash in inspirational sports movies. There’s Netflix’s Rez Ball, about a basketball team on a Native American reservation. There’s The Fire Inside, about female boxer Claressa Shields. And there’s Unstoppable, about wrestler Anthony Robles who was born with one leg starring Jharrel Jerome in the lead role.
Jharrel Jerome
TIFFThere is a formula to these movies: The trick is how well they can pull that off and what surprises they can add to the mix. Unstoppable makes for a solid, if sometimes generic, riff on this well-trod genre. Its most intriguing feature is not the supporting performance from Lopez as Anthony’s mother Judy—although she was without a doubt the glitziest presence at the premiere, wearing that shimmering, leg-baring dress with black bows up the side. Instead, it’s the almost radical way that the movie—for the most part—treats Anthony’s disability.
While the fact that Robles only has one leg is the very reason his story is so notable, a large chunk of the movie treats that fact as a secondary. Anthony’s goal is to be considered like just another competitor and the movie allows him that, refusing to harp on what makes him different.
Directed by William Goldenberg, best known as an editor for his work on films like Argo, Unstoppable opens with Anthony as a star high school athlete in Mesa, Arizona. He dreams of going to the University of Iowa, which has a renowned wrestling program, but despite being a national champion, he only has one collegiate offer. It’s from Drexel, and he’s unsure about taking it because of the school’s lack of success in the sport.
Meanwhile, there’s tension at his house. Judy, played by Lopez, is a caring, supportive mom embroiled in an abusive relationship with his stepfather Rick, an over-the-top Bobby Cannavale. When Rick abandons her and Anthony’s three siblings, the young man decides to stay local and walk onto the Arizona State team. The parable-quoting coach Shawn Charles (Don Cheadle) explains he’s going to have to earn his spot and he does. These trials make for some of the most exhilarating sequences. You can see the ferocious determination on Jerome’s as he ascends a rocky mountain, his crutches occasionally slipping on the terrain.
Jerome, who won an Emmy for When They See Us, puts in an intensely physical performance, adopting Robles’s gait as well as his style of competition. He allows his version of Anthony a tenderness beneath his grit.
But for a sports movie, Unstoppable could use a little more, well, sports. Despite one scene late in the film where Anthony’s high school coach (Michael Peña) asks him why he pursues wrestling, we never really understand the nuances of what drives him to grapple with other men on a mat. In fact, we get so little of the rules of actual wrestling that, if you’re not well-versed, you might be a little perplexed when the big bout finally comes around. I was.
Instead of spending time with Anthony training with his teammates or examining the psychology of his athletic prowess, the action frequently cuts to his interactions with Judy and the cruel Rick. And yet the mother-son story never feels fully fleshed out either and is where the movie most frequently slides into cliché.
Arguably the reason we spend so much time with Judy is that Lopez is playing her. Unstoppable, in fact, is a remnant of Lopez and Affleck’s most recent coupling, which is now resulting in a much-discussed divorce. Artists Equity, Affleck’s company with Matt Damon, produced the movie.
Despite being the shiniest person on stage with her showstopping gown, even Lopez’s presence was overshadowed at the Q&A following the screening by the real life Judy and Anthony, who received the majority of the audience’s adoration. Lopez introduced Judy saying, “It was a pleasure and an honor to not only meet but to portray a woman who poured her heart and soul and her blood, literally, into her children, teaching them that nothing is more important than family.” Later Lopez said that while talking to Judy she realized “we were just almost the same person in a weird way, even though we were so different and we had different lives. That at the core and the heart of who we were at first we were moms and beyond that we had had similar struggles.”
But Lopez never fully slips into the role of Judy, her movie star aura refusing to disappear even in her character’s toughest moments. She never finds a version of this woman that isn’t defined by the men around her—her wonderful son or horrible spouse. She is at her ferocious best when she is yelling at inconsiderate fans in the crowd during Anthony’s matches.
Unstoppable is frequently a movie guided by convention. It’s there in the ups and downs of Lopez’s performance and in the way the whole thing ends with photos of the real life people. But in Jerome’s work, and the way Goldenberg’s the camera sees Anthony’s strength, there’s something that transcends the sports movie framework.
