Ali (2001) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski) and Tuna

Two thumbs up on this one.

When I was in high school, Muhammed Ali (then known as Cassius Clay) was a brash, young trash-talkin' fighter who was able to back up his boasts with a surprising thrashing of heavyweight champion Sonny Liston, a one round knockout in the rematch, and a subsequent undefeated record. Back then, we never heard trash talk from a major athlete before, and I didn't know how to react to it. I was a kid. I suppose I didn't think much of him then, and I probably rooted for someone to kick his butt. Fat chance of that. The man floated like a butterfly, stung like a bee, and kept stingin' until his title was taken from him by executive decree, thereby accomplishing what nobody could do in the ring.

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years. (Famous quote commonly misattributed to Mark Twain)

I guess I could make the same comments about me and Ali. Of course, he was more or less the same guy in 1969 as in 1964, but I was pleased by how much he had grown by the time I got to be a college junior! When I was in college, Mohammed Ali was the dethroned champ. He last defended his title in March of 1967, shortly after his 25th birthday, when I was a freshman, and would not fight again until October, 1970, nearly a year after I graduated. Like any college student, I was breaking away from the sheltered world of my childhood, learning to think for myself, learning to deal with the issues that I had to face without my parents' help. Like Vietnam. My college years, in that best and worst of times, also happened to be the beginning of the counter-cultural revolution. As I've written elsewhere, the 60's, as you picture them, love beads and protest and cultural revolution, actually occured between 1967 and 1974. The "summer of love", the kick-off to the real "60s", occured in 1967, and the campus revolts came shortly thereafter. Ali was stripped of his title at almost the same time.

During my college years, Ali was battling the draft board and the boxing commissions, and was therefore facing some hard times economically because he could not perform in his chosen profession. This didn't do much for his popularity among the older folks, but he suddenly became the darling of our generation. Nothing weighed heavier on our minds than the draft, so he was fighting not just for himself, but for all of us. Nobody could have done it better. He fought with honor and principle, and refused to be inducted even after the U.S. Government offered him a sweetheart deal. ("Just accept induction, and being the champ can be your duty").

Given his economic woes during that period, Ali chose to earn fees by speaking on college campuses. He was the perfect college speaker. He was fighting the establishment in several ways. His wit was famed, his rhetoric was sharp, and his life embodied everything that was on our minds at the time. Many wise men wrote learned treatises attempting to explain why so many students and African-Americans had such strong anti-Vietnam sentiments, but Ali encapsulated it in one sentence, "no Vietcong ever called me nigger".

He came to Fordham in my junior year, I think it was, and it may have been the single greatest speaking engagement in the history of speaking engagements. I suppose that any sensible, average man would have used up the hour he got paid for and gone back to his life. Not Ali. He keep on speaking and bantering with the student audience in the campus center until the management needed to clean up the ballroom for something else. Then he told everybody to reconvene outside on the lawn. And then this man, the single most famous man in the world at the time, walked through the Bronx campus about a half a mile, followed by hundreds or maybe thousands of adoring college students, until he came to the only available area in Rose Hill with enough green space to accommodate the size of our group. And then he talked some more, not from a podium, but just walking and shouting among the crowd. He shadow boxed and jokingly sparred with the wise guys, including me, and he discussed every subject everyone threw at him, with both candid and humorous remarks. By the time he left, I had already gone, but hundreds were still at it. I don't know how many hours he lasted, but I've never seen anything like it in my life, and probably never will again.

1974 represented the end of the era of revolt, marked by two symbolic moments. Nixon resigned in August, and Ali miraculously regained his world title two months later, not by decree, but in the ring against big George Foreman. The revolution was over. We won. Ali, as our official generational symbol, also won. The movie ends with Howard Cosell's voice ringing in our ears, "Muhammed Ali has done the impossible. He has regained the title which was unfairly taken from him so many years ago." Ol' Howard wasn't too objective, but he was right.

Although having lost the best years of his boxing life, and universally considered too old to take the crown from Foreman in 1974, Ali triumphed that day, and continued to fight for seven more years. He last won a title bout in 1978, when he was rapidly approaching 37 years old.

Here is his Hickok biography

I guess you can tell from my tone that it's hard for me to remain dispassionate about this film, which covers the period from 1964, when Ali first won the heavyweight title, to 1974, when he won it back.

So is it good? Yes. It isn't without flaws, but it is very good.

• It has some moments which brought me to tears. Director Michael Mann contributed his special sensibility to the emotionally laden moments.
• I have already ordered the CD of the soundtrack. African music, Sam Cooke, Motown ...
• You know that I rarely agree with the Oscar nominations, but there is no doubt that Will Smith deserved his nomination. After about a minute, I completely forgot that I was watching Will Smith, because I wasn't. I was watching Muhammed Ali. He had it nailed. The humor, the inflections, the blustering, the body, even the ring movements. And it wasn't some cheap Rich Little impersonation. He handled the emotions and everything else beautifully, all while completely in character. It is one of the greatest performances I have ever seen. I had no idea Will had this kind of talent.
• Some of the supporting performances are nearly as good.

Is it a mass-audience crowd-pleaser? Regrettably not. It is 157 minutes long, artistic, and it tries to cover too much, thus losing focus in the early going. Each of Ali's major lovers is introduced, none of whom had much bearing on the rest of the story, all of whom could have been cut without losing a thing. Short shrift is also given to the strained relationship between Ali and the Nation of Islam, the schism in the Nation itself, and the tension between Ali and his biological father. It's not that there weren't great moments in these sub-plots, but rather that there were too many of them and they didn't always fit well into the pacing of the narrative. I don't have any idea, for example, why they introduced Malcolm X into the story at all. I'm sure his relationship with Ali was probably an interesting story, but it wasn't THIS story, and I sure don't know what was interesting about it after having watched this movie twice.

Did I like the film? Well, read the last word of the previous paragraph. The sucker is more than two and a half hours long, and I watched it twice in a row. And I liked it better the second time. I think that tells you that it had some magnetic moments that drew me back. What more can you ask of a film?