Some movies hit too close to home. Others hit close enough. 

I had friends whose father’s were in Vietnam. They weren’t interested in spending two hours watching Platoon, Apocalypse Now, Tropic Thunder or Good Morning, Vietnam.

My dad was a firefighter. If Ron Howard’s Backdraft wanted a seal of approval, the pyrotechnic scenes were enough to make my dad turn it off. He’s never seen it and doesn’t want to. He had been in the room with his oxygen running out and the fire races up the corner of the wall enough times – he didn’t need to see Kurt Russell deal with it. 

Probably the best example I know involved the Atlanta Olympic bomber.

A journalist friend of mine was in Olympic Park the night Richard Jewell saved hundreds when a terrorist bomb went off. He reviewed music for a sister paper of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and was the only reporter who was in the park. He couldn’t leave and no one could get in. 

He walked the area, seen the mangled bodies of people he knew who had made the trip to the Olympics. He handed notes to other reporters by crime scene tape, some written on napkins or whatever he could find. I think he told me he had blood on him at some point, but he wasn’t sure who’s it was.

When Clint Eastwood’s movie Richard Jewell was released in 2019. Jewell was played by Paul Walter Hauser. My reporter friend nearly yelled at me when I asked if he would see the movie. It wasn’t something he wanted to live again or feel again, whether fictional, on film or otherwise. 

I’ve never had a movie hit too close to home like my dad, my friend’s father or my fellow reporter. But I’ve had several hit close enough, and that’s how I felt about The Iron Claw.

I’m old enough to remember the Von Erichs on ESPN and the amazing World Class product at that time. I remember seeing them on the covers of magazines at the grocery store. I remember Kerry Von Erich in the WWF and wondered why an idiot would call him the Texas Tornado. 

In the late 80s, I dealt with suicide before I was even a teenager. In elementary school a classmate told me he was going to kill himself. I was young and I still don’t understand everything that happened, but I alerted a teacher, and then came a principal. Later, I assumed he took something. I don’t know. I never saw him again but was told everything was fine. 

In middle school a friend of mine was found dead in the closet of a juvenile detention home. We were in seventh grade. 

I heard news snippets through those years about Mike and Chris Von Erich, and then Kerry. Some things are too bad to imagine. War is one, family tragedy on this scale was another. Other families had similar tragedies, and the Von Erichs weren’t alone even in wrestling with the Grahams, or even in Dallas at the time of Kerry’s death. 

I talked to Kevin Von Erich once in the early 2000s for a short time. He was a guest on Chairshots Radio with my friend Rod Siciliano. I had called him to ask a few questions about World Class. To call him patient is an understatement. To call him nice doesn’t do him justice. 

I’ve dealt with enough death inside and outside the wrestling business to want to watch it as entertainment. 

When I heard The Iron Claw was in pre-production I was more dismayed than surprise. When I saw Zac Efron attached, I was shocked. I couldn’t understand why an A-list actor would want to tell this story, or what could come of it.

With A24 as the studio, I became confused. Sometimes you’re close enough you can’t see what others see in a story. 

Sean Durkin Does the Impossible

Last weekend I finally watched the movie. Almost daring myself to, despite not wanting any part of it since I heard the project started. Maybe it was curiosity, maybe it was seeing how close the film came to nailing a David Von Erich promo with Kerry and Kevin standing by him. 

To put how one particular scene moved me is too hard without sharing how much film I’ve watched and how much I’ve written about it. It needs perspective. 

I’ve watched thousands of movies in my life, and written movie reviews for too many websites and blogs to count. 

I’ve written essays and obituaries for RogerEbert.com. An essay I wrote about movie, The Right Stuff, after John Glenn’s death, earned me a comment from Chuck Yeager’s official Twitter account. (A family member, typing instead for him, said they had read my essay to Chuck, whose opinion of my work was, “Other than being full of shit, wasn’t half bad,” which I still consider as one of my proudest moments as a writer.)

Out of all those films I can hardly remember a scene as cathartic, as emotional, as sentimental and one as close to the heart as one I saw in The Iron Claw. 

Inhale enough pop culture, social media, music, film it will numb you to the ups and downs  normal riders take in a movie theater or sitting on your couch or recliner

There’s also this other problem called life. Life turns into a mix of wanting to sleep, apathy, weariness and wishing for just five seconds you could feel what you did at Christmas when you were 10, or at a family gathering with all your cousins, or what it was like the first time you took your son or daughter or home from the hospital. To have a parent or grandparent back for a second, or a long-forgotten day with childhood friends. 

The Iron Claw gave me that moment and after some research I wasn’t the only one. It pulls the humanity that’s covered with callouses out and reminds you why you watch movies or why dumb kids in Ohio watch wrestling families in Texas. 

I wondered what kind of madman would want to write and direct a Von Erich  and what Sean Durkin could possibly tell that hasn’t been re-told tearfully for over 30 years.

The direction and design is flawless. It’s 1985 back to life. The main cast is magical, especially Lily James, Maureen Tierney and Holt McCallany, whose performance is career-making. 

The best moments are between Efron, Jeremy Allen White, Stanley Simons and Harris Dickinson as the brothers, whose performance is almost as a foursome than a four contrasting actors. 

The approach is what makes the movie work. The world and parents fail them, as do the notions of who they should be, but the brothers haven’t failed each other in Durkin’s telling. 

Efron is the most featured, and carries a weight on his back and in his look that’s both drastic and painful to watch. Efron’s Kevin crying and telling his own sons he “used to be a brother” is a blow that rocks as hard as the other moment delivers in comfort. 

Chris Von Erich isn’t mentioned, but blended with Mike. It’s an unfortunate part of making a film like this. But Efron, Durkin and company do right by the family and have earned a long-time fan in doing so. Efron with his graceful, soulful and heavy performance. Durkin in the way I least expected. 

Durkin does what the best directors and writers have always done, from Quentin Tarantino to John Ford. But he is a rare exception that has them beat in one major respect. 

He doesn’t make his movie the way it should have been, but in how we hope it was and in that way, he did the impossible. He gave a graceful fictional ending to an enduring American family tragedy.