Word: alis
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JESS CAGLE, TIME's West Coast senior editor, reports on the making of director Michael Mann's new movie about Muhammad Ali, one of the most compelling and controversial figures of the 20th century. Talk with Jess about Ali, Ali, and the man who plays Ali, Will Smith, on Wednesday...
...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...
...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...
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...
...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...