The following contains spoilers for The Smashing MachineThe Smashing Machine is just the latest sports movie to fall into a frustrating sports movie trope. The Smashing Machine is a structurally interesting approach to the traditional sports movie. Inspired by a documentary focused on mixed-martial-arts fighter Mark Kerr, it follows many trends of that genre while finding depth in unexpected downbeat moments of humanity.
These quieter moments are what make The Smashing Machine stand out in an otherwise crowded genre and have helped push Dwayne Johnson into the Oscar race. Unfortunately, the other lead character in the film isn’t afforded the same potential for depth, turning a potentially compelling co-lead into another example of a cliché that Hollywood keeps falling back on.
The Smashing Machine Turns Dawn Into A Trope
Emily Blunt’s performance in The Smashing Machine is remarkably broad, leaning more into the tropes of the “fighter’s conflicted significant other” than a fully fleshed out character. Blunt plays Dawn with a big personality and a trigger temper. She’s eager to be affectionate but quick to anger, her quiet conversations often and quickly turning into shouting matches.
This happens repeatedly throughout The Smashing Machine, especially as her relationship with Mark goes through challenges. The intent seems to be to highlight the tension between the pair and the contrast in their emotional states. Mark and Dawn are both “smashing machines” in their own ways, quick to descend into passive-aggressive confrontations that can explode.
The difference is Mark gets more dedicated time to deconstruct these moments silently. Mark is the main character of the film; that’s to be expected. The problem is that these moments are really revealing about the film’s version of Mark. In silence, Mark lets his walls down and either stiffens up, breaks down, or struggles to overcome his emotions.
It’s the most human the character feels, contrasting against the persona Mark puts on around others and the confidence he clings to as a fighter. These are the moments that make The Smashing Machine work and give Dwayne Johnson room to explore the character. Dawn doesn’t get that. She’s either positively supportive, deeply saddened, or outrageously angry; nothing in between.
There’s little solo time spent with Dawn. Dawn never gets the keen focus that Mark does, where the film makes it impossible to look away from Mark. Her only scene outside of Mark is a birthday lunch with a friend, and even there, she only reveals snippets of her perspective instead of her internal self.
Hollywood Can’t Escape This Sports Movie Cliché
Whether the fault of the editing, the script, or the performance, Emily Blunt’s Dawn in The Smashing Machine is a far broader character than she needed to be. At times, it comes across less as a three-dimensional person and more like the pervasive “girlfriend in a boxing movie” archetype.
Cinderella Man, Creed, The Fighter, Raging Bull, Rocky, The Wrestler, and classic movies like The Set-Up and Somebody Up There Likes Me all mined drama between the main fighter and their girlfriend/wife character for narrative tension. Their fears over the profession and their varying degrees of personal conflict or instability are a frequent source of dynamics in this genre.
The trope is so pervasive in sports movies that Saturday Night Live created an entire character around parodying the archetype. Played by Heidi Gardner, Angel was literally described as Every Boxer’s Girlfriend from Every Movie About Boxing Ever, comparing current events to her comically tumultuous relationship with her troubled but determined fighter boyfriend.
Angel’s exaggerated dramatics aren’t too far off from the broad characterization of Emily Blunt’s performance. The biggest complication of all this is that Blunt’s portrayal is based on a real person. Dawn Staples is a real person, the ex-wife of Mark Kerr and one-half of The Smashing Machine’s subject matter in adapting the documentary of the same name.
Blunt’s performance draws from a real person and real stories, suggesting a genuine attempt to recreate someone the documentary depicted as a fairly dramatic person. That makes the broad performance choices more understandable, but the movie is still missing something that was crucial to making the performance really land better than those previous iterations of this archetype.
The Smashing Machine isn’t focused on Dawn, but it still needed to peel back the layers of the character. The really frustrating thing is that there was potential for it in the source material that could have perfectly drawn attention to Dawn’s internal emotional state and subverted the trope in the same Mark undercuts the typical sports biopic subject
The film highlights the tension that develops between Dawn and Mark when she keeps drinking while Mark attempts to go sober. However, it fails to emphasize the degree of her own struggles with alcohol that the documentary emphasized. The movie version of Dawn doesn’t have this, just a scene depicting drinks with a friend for her birthday.
There’s a single scene that really touches on this potential. Early in the film, there’s a long shot focusing on Dawn after Mark bristles against her presence at a fight. It speaks to the kind of more complicated characterization Blunt could bring to the character. It’s a shame she doesn’t get any similar moments in the movie.
Taking time to see Dawn alone to underscore her own internal feelings, giving her the room to process her life in the same way Mark does, could have given Blunt the same compelling focus that gives Johnson room to deliver his best work in the film. As is, it’s just the extremes, which makes Blunt’s performance feel incomplete.