Review: Fighting with My Family Spins Comedy Out of a Wrestler’s Rise to Fame

Paige’s search for an in-ring persona mirrors the dynamic between performance and identity at work in pro wrestling.

Fighting with My Family
Photo: MGM

Based on the true story of WWE wrestler Paige’s rise to fame, Fighting with My Family is a charming love letter to, and apologia for, the aesthetics of professional wrestling. At the same time, writer-director Stephen Merchant’s portrait of his main character is almost entirely stitched together from a series of telegraphed moves. Fighting with My Family is essentially a comedy grafted onto a story of a woman’s athletic self-discovery, with a few unelaborated thoughts on wrestling’s theatrics sprinkled throughout.

Merchant’s film profiles the journey of Paige, née Raya Knight (Florence Pugh), from her roots in a wrestling-obsessed working-class family in Norwich, England to her explosive entrance into the WWE. She and her family—brother Zak (Jack Lowden), mother Julia (Lena Headey), and father Ricky (Nick Frost)—make their living fighting in their tiny, local wrestling league, mostly in half-filled community halls and back rooms around their corner of England. The film is nothing if not humane for its focus on their devotional passion for the sport. As Raya’s mom puts it at one point: “Some people find religion, I found wrestling.”

After Paige is selected for a WWE training program in Florida, and Zak is rejected, the film follows her struggles to make her family proud and get used to a sport whose standards don’t allow for her personal style: an unapologetically working-class and distinctly metal appearance. The road is hard and isolating for Paige, especially because of her guilt over Zak’s resentful downward spiral in response to his rejection by the WWE. But her ultimate struggle is to translate her regular personality into a character built for the ring.

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Merchant’s screenplay gives a lightness to Paige and her off-kilter family’s dynamics, with the film hitting a comedic—sometimes over-earnestly corny—tone early on. Here, Frost and Headey dominate as a comedic tag team of sorts, highlighting the way Julia and Ricky used wrestling to turn their lives around. But as Fighting with My Family pivots to more overtly dramatic terrain, it’s Pugh’s performance that holds the film together. She illuminates how Paige carries herself with a plain vulnerability, neither overwrought nor muted, which lends a small but important affect to the young woman’s search for a comfortable identity.

The film foregrounds Paige’s behind-the-scenes experiences, namely her time in gyms, training rings, and hotels on the road. As such, Merchant effectively makes the world of pro wrestling feel almost comprehensible, even relatable, to the unwashed. At the same time, by downplaying the melodramatics of pro wrestling, Fighting with My Family comes to feel decidedly non-spectacular and anodyne. As hard as it is to make a film about professional wrestling without a good amount of smackdown—and, to be sure, the film has a fair amount of it—the usual, bluntly libidinal thrills of the sport feel muted here, even when Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson appears on screen to play a younger version of himself.

Paige’s own search for an authentic-seeming, in-ring persona mirrors the dynamic between performance and identity at work in pro wrestling. Her coach, Hutch (Vince Vaughn), is the didactic voice for the film’s defense of the complicated performances that go into the sport. He frequently lectures aspiring pro wrestlers about what the sport is really about: It’s not “fake,” as detractors never fail to point out, but “stylized,” a nuanced and open-ended interplay between character, narrative, and audience. For viewers less familiar with pro wrestling, these scenes may feel like being handed a syllabus. And rather than explicating these themes, Fighting with My Family falls prey to the sports biopic’s worst tendency: its harried attempt to condense its subject to a few easy-to-parse moments of struggle and triumph. Thus, while it pays lip service to the fascinating theatrical norms of pro wrestling, the film ends up expending most of its energy on its search for barriers that Paige can break through.

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The depiction of Paige’s upset against WWE Divas Champion AJ Lee (played by actual wrestler Thea “Zeilna Vega” Trinidad) summarizes this rift in the subject matter. The actual 2014 showdown between the two began with Lee grandstanding. After she finished, Paige sauntered out in wrestling garb as if she were about to challenge Lee. But instead, she started meekly congratulating a champ she admired. In response, Lee suddenly pounced on her but was quickly pinned. It was a surprising, if hokey, performance that played up Paige’s weird-girl style and helped underline her persona’s central tension. But in the film’s staging of the scene, Paige is silent and frozen, awkwardly staring before Lee’s attack.

That difference is minor but illustrative. Having Paige fail to say anything, which hearkens to an earlier scene in Fighting with My Family where she also freezes up in the ring against a competitor, exists to amp up the personal drama of her match with AJ Lee. But it also effectively downplays what was, in real life, an interesting interplay between performance and stylized personhood—all in favor of squeezing in a final moment of triumph where Paige can claim her identity as a “freak from Norwich.” This scene feels all too typical in a film that never quite decides if Paige’s journey is one of self-performance or self-acceptance.

Score: 
 Cast: Florence Pugh, Jack Lowden, Nick Frost, Lena Headey, Vince Vaughn, Dwayne Johnson, James Burrows, Zelina Vega  Director: Stephen Merchant  Screenwriter: Stephen Merchant  Distributor: MGM  Running Time: 108 min  Rating: PG-13  Year: 2019

Peter Goldberg

Peter Goldberg is a New York City-based film critic and copywriter whose criticism has appeared in The Baffler, Film Comment, and The Brooklyn Rail.

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