The fight of his life

James Toback on Tyson, his candid
portrait of the embattled boxer

PARADOXICAL PUGILIST: Mike Tyson

by MARK SLUTSKY

Few figures in popular culture are as paradoxical as Mike Tyson. The one-time heavyweight champion of the world is a fighter of almost supernatural power and brutality with an uncommon ability to intimidate his opponents, a convicted rapist, a Holyfield-ear-biter, a force of nature. At the same time he’s a man who is transparently emotionally vulnerable, unnervingly soft-spoken and possessed of a famous high-pitched lisping voice.

The boxer’s complexity is on full, fascinating display in Tyson, a new documentary by filmmaker James Toback (The Pick-Up Artist, Black and White). It’s an inspired pairing—Toback himself is famous for his excesses and the two have been friends for years. Though it shows signs of the stylistic experimentation in his most recent work, the result of their collaboration is a movie far more focused and accomplished than anything he’s done in years.

Based on a series of interviews with Tyson, the film is narrated almost entirely by the pugilist himself, who speaks to the camera with amazing candour about everything, really—his tough upbringing in Brooklyn and juvenile detention, his apprenticeship under trainer Cus D’Amato, the championships, the marriage to Robin Givens, prison, the ear-biting, the face tattoo. It’s hardly objective, but it is a riveting self-portrait nonetheless.

Speaking to the Mirror over the phone, Toback talks about his first meeting with the man, over 20 years ago: “He came by the set of The Pick-Up Artist. He was there to meet [Robert] Downey [Jr.], but he and I hit it off almost immediately. And that was it. It was really a communion at first glance, first conversation.”

An interesting rapport grew between the Harvard-educated Jewish filmmaker and the Brooklyn brawler. “There was the superficial fascination with boxing, which I’d always been interested in since I was a kid. But more than that, we had similar interests—in sex, madness, love, race, crime and death, which pretty much covers it. It was pretty clear that first time that that was true.”

Tyson, the film, grew out of a creative relationship between the two. “We had done two movies before,” Toback says, referring to Black and White and When Will I Be Loved, “And it was something I thought would work very well. From the minute I mentioned it he said ‘Whenever you’re ready.’ I think that he has a kind of fundamentally closet confessional nature and that this afforded him an opportunity to really, not just tell his side of things, but to be kind of exhaustively open about these voices that are in him.”

Vicious voices

The voices in Tyson’s head haunt the film; Toback frequently uses a collage-like, split-screen style where multiple takes are mixed together to imply the man’s complicated thoughts and emotions. Shooting for five days, Toback says, “I intentionally remained out of view, out of his eyeline. I wanted it to feel like a kind of psychoanalytic, rather than therapeutic environment. With face-to-face it seems kind of rational and back-and-forth, with the exchange being limited to what is in one’s conscious mind. Whereas if I could induce these voices to come out in spite of themselves, I felt that might be a more ambitious way of doing it.”

Over the years, Tyson’s endured a pummelling in the press and in the public eye as vicious as anything he’s ever meted out to an opponent. Toback is clearly in the fighter’s corner: “I think he’s been completely misrepresented, in the sense that there’s been this focus on two events, the ear-biting of Holyfield—which when you see the movie you realize he was more than justified in doing on a certain level—and then the rape conviction. I certainly take him at his word that it was completely outrageous, the verdict. Alan Dershowitz, who is certainly among the sharpest legal minds, he said that in 40 years of practicing law he had never seen a greater miscarriage of justice.” (It has to be said, though, that Dershowitz represented Tyson on appeal—he’s hardly disinterested.)

As Tyson makes clear, Tyson’s life and career has followed the arc of a classic rise and fall, with incredible heights and horrific, humiliating lows. “He referred to it, when he saw it, as a Greek tragedy,” Toback says of the film. “He said ‘The only problem is, I’m the subject.’ And I think that in a way it’s a double Greek tragedy, because he went way down, he went way up, he went way down and way up again and he’s trying now, I think, to find his way—although it’s hard to say exactly in what area. As he says at the end, ‘The past is history, the future’s a mystery.’”