Honours to De Niro, tears from Duran – ‘Hands’ a moving tale of boxer’s journey to stardom

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PARIS, May 17, (Agencies): It has been a while since legendary boxer Roberto Duran had a crowd on their feet chanting his name, but they did in Cannes on Monday after a screening of a film on his life starring Robert De Niro. Both De Niro and Duran had tears in their eyes as they embraced to a standing ovation after the moving tale of the Panamanian’s journey to boxing stardom in “Hands of Stone” in Cannes, where De Niro was honoured for his five decade-long acting career.

“I don’t know what to say, it’s just great. All I can say is thank you,” a visibly moved De Niro said after a clip was played showing many of his roles from “Casino” to “Taxi Driver”.

“It’s a great honour to be honoured here in Cannes said the 72-year-old New Yorker.

Producer Harvey Weinstein, said that De Niro had been “a mentor, the guy who tells you the truth even when you don’t want to hear it and the consummate actor.”

“I will cry, I will,” said an emotional Weinstein.

De Niro cracked Panama tax jokes as he told of the journey to make the movie, which was eventually filmed in the country most recently in the news for the “Panama Papers” scandal.

Duran, known as “Hands of Stone”, is a national hero in Panama, and the movie tracks his life as a child on the gritty streets of the country, where he was marked by riots over America’s control of the Panama Canal.

De Niro plays Ray Arcel, who trained 18 world champions and was tasked with turning the hothead, America-hating Duran into world champion.

The film comes 36 years after his Oscar-winning performance as self-destructive boxer Jake LaMotta in Martin Scorsese’s 1980 classic “Raging Bull”.

“Hands of Stone” focuses on the rivalry between the Panamanian brawler (played by Edgar Ramirez) and Sugar Ray Leonard (played by the singer Usher Raymond).

After winning the WBC welterweight title from Leonard in 1980, Duran shocked the world by quitting mid-fight in a rematch five months later, reportedly with the words “No Mas” (No More) — which he still denies saying.

Duran — who began his professional career at 16 — fought on till he was 50.

Award

The actor Ramirez also paid tribute to De Niro, whom he first met in Cannes five years ago when De Niro was president of the jury and Ramirez was presenting an award.

“Cannes must be the city of dreams as today five years later I have him standing in my corner, not only in film, but most importantly in life,” said Ramirez, also moved to tears by Duran’s reaction after the movie was screened.

De Niro starred in two films that won Cannes’ top prize, the Palme d’Or — Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” in 1976 and “Mission” by the British director Roland Joffe 10 years later.

Roberto Duran remains the greatest lightweight boxer in history, and one of the most celebrated fighters, period. But unlike such legends of the ring as Muhammad Ali, Sugar Ray Leonard, or Mike Tyson, he never had a very idiosyncratic boxing style. He didn’t dance, or rope-a-dope, or use his fists like a Mack truck. He was a paragon of classic quickness and power, a bruiser who wasted no time going in for the kill.

“Hands of Stone”, a Duran biopic that lifts its title from his fists-of-fury nickname, has a tone that very much mirrors Duran’s mode of fighting. Directed by the Venezuelan-born Jonathan Jakubowicz, who also wrote the script, the film punches ahead in a conventional, aggressive, no-frills way. At this point, of course, the bar for boxing films has been set rather staggeringly high. “Raging Bull” turned the pugilistic melodrama into Shakespearean blood opera (it also had the greatest fight scenes that had ever been staged), and in recent years other movies have only built upon its achievement. “The Fighter”, with its dizzying use of hand-held camera, put the audience even more close-up into the action, and “Creed”, with its fight scenes coming at you in astonishingly fluid unbroken takes, upped the ringside existential intensity. “Hands of Stone”, by contrast, gets the job done, but it’s hard to escape the feeling that you’re watching a routinely conceived, rather generic boxing flick. It’s utterly competent, yet it makes Duran’s story seem a little so-what?

The film’s limitation begins with the reality that we’re never asked to feel very close to Duran as a character — and not because he’s such a cocky, angry, even abusive SOB. (That didn’t keep us from having a profound identification with Jake La Motta.) Rather, as played by Edgar Ramirez, he’s a hothead who rarely slips out of his standard, strutting mode of bellicose self-satisfaction. He’s drafted into the boxing ring as a young boy growing up in Panama, and what drives him from the start is that he’s got a chip on his shoulder a mile wide. It’s all about the United States — the country that colonized Panama by building, and controlling, the Canal Zone starting in 1904 — and also about his father, who abandoned him and (to add insult to injury) was an American. The Roberto who emerges from this double slap of humiliation is a blustery macho with a hidden inferiority complex.

Recognize

When he spies, on the street, a precocious schoolgirl named Felicidad (played as an angel of fire by Ana de Armas), and announces within 30 seconds of meeting that he wants to marry her, we recognize a young man’s bravado, but it already appears that Roberto’s desire to dominate is out of control.

He’s set up as a world-class fighter by Carlos Eleta (Ruben Blades), the richest man in Panama, but the key figure in his boxing life isn’t this moneybags manager. It’s the legendary trainer Ray Arcel (Robert De Niro), who in the course of a 50-year career has trained 18 world champions, but he was drummed out of the business by the Mob, all for the crime of wanting to take boxing national by setting up his own television deals. In Roberto, he glimpses a hungry fury that makes him want to get back in the game — though to placate the gangster who forced him to retire (played by John Turturro in a performance so understated that you wish he always played quiet gangsters), he’s forced to take no payment for his services.

Ray is 72 by the time he hooks up with Roberto, and De Niro, with scraggly gray-white hair framing a high forehead that makes him look like Lee Strasberg in “The Godfather, Part II”, plays him as a disarmingly articulate mentor-coach, an analyst of the sweet science, one who keeps insisting to Roberto that a winning bout comes down to strategy. Every detail counts, like the way that Ray, at ringside, combs back Roberto’s hair between rounds, so that he’ll come out each time looking fresh, as a way to psych out his opponent. De Niro, his dialogue salted with Yiddishisms like schmendrick, plays Ray as a tough nut of decency, and he’s by far the most compelling presence in the film.

The trajectory of Duran’s career comes off as fairly standard, and Jakubowicz, though he’s an energized filmmaker, doesn’t find many nuances within the situations. Roberto keeps scoring knockouts on his way to the top, and then he becomes the lightweight champion of the world by clobbering Sugar Ray Leonard, who up until then has been undefeated. Leonard is played by the pop star Usher (here billed as Usher Raymond IV), and it’s a nifty piece of casting, because the actor, with a touch of prosthetics, doesn’t just look like Leonard, he embodies his exuberant nimble-kill spirit. Duran is able to undermine Sugar Ray with sadistic psychological warfare: He bursts into a cafeteria to insult Leonard’s wife, which is really his way of luring Sugar Ray into his own aggressive orbit and away from Leonard’s subtler fight game.

And then comes the downfall. Roberto’s manager, eager to make an $8 million score, arranges with Don King — played with wily finesse by Reg E. Cathey — for Duran to fight Sugar Ray again, just five months later. Duran hasn’t stopped partying to celebrate his first victory, and he’s put on 40 pounds, which he has to lose. But the real thing he’s lost is his desire.

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