Even though the lesbian boxing movie Christy didn’t quite deliver on its potential, as both a person who trains martial arts (specifically Muay Thai) and who is an abuse survivor, it still knocked me on my ass. Christy follows the real life story of Christy Martin, a boxer who debuted in the 1990s. Christy Martin is known both for her role in putting women’s boxing on the map and for her abusive relationship with her trainer and husband, Jim Martin, the man who almost killed her. I think I was reading between the lines though, picking up what wasn’t said aloud by the movie, things they could have pulled out and showed the audience if they were braver, willing to dig deeper.
Marketed as a sports movie, Christy actually focuses on the evolution of the abusive relationship between Christy Martin and her trainer-turned husband/trainer/manager Jim Martin. My colleague Drew noted that the fight scenes felt lackluster, and it’s true — the cinematography for the boxing matches is uninspired, straightforward. To her credit, it seems like Sweeney put in some real work, committing to putting on a boxing performance, and she took hits to the face during filming, too. To be real, I don’t know if there is an actor who could pull off looking like Christy does in the ring. Actors aren’t usually pro boxers, let alone the kind of out-of-the-gate storm of talent that was Christy Martin. But it was a solid attempt at a depiction. Nothing is black and white. You can have heart and grit and also still be someone who is not playing the role of a woman who has known she was a lesbian since she was in middle school.
Apparently, “transformations” are Oscar bait, and Sweeney allegedly underwent some wild transformation by gaining some muscle (which, yes, you need to eat to accomplish) and putting on a wig — and even so, Sweeney still failed to embody the lesbian swagger the real-life Christy carries with her from interview to ring, no matter how “feminine” she dresses. I don’t care about whether an actor’s face and form completely match that of the person they’re portraying — they’re two different people after all. It’s more about energy. In the movie and in real life, Jim susses out Christy’s sexuality early. Christy Martin reports that she knew she was a lesbian from the age of 12. From the start, the movie plunges us into the realities of being gay in a small West Virginia coal town with Christy and her then-girlfriend Rosie in bed, Rosie telling Christy she’s being sent to live with a relative so that they can keep an eye on her. At the dining room table, Christy’s mom confronts her about her sexuality, making it clear her family disapproves of her. It overshadows Christy’s recent win in a Toughman Contest.
Belittlement at home would overshadow just about every win for Christy. If it wasn’t her mom making her feel wrong and unwanted for her sexuality, it was Jim. After every win in the ring, Jim would insult Christy at home. “We would win, I would lose,” Christy said.
The movie makes the mistake of thinking that Christy’s particular brand of trash-talking in public is somehow separate from her — to the detriment of watchers understanding the nature of the abuse Jim put Christy through. Heather Schwedel for Slate, for example, said of Christy: “That Martin could be so tough in public and yet in private be abused by her husband and coach, Jim Martin (played by Ben Foster), is theoretically an interesting dichotomy for the film to explore, but Christy doesn’t spend enough time on Martin’s interior life. Instead, you’re left wondering whether to root for a character who often acts like a jerk, whose more human side we barely get to know.”
Drew Burnett Gregory summed it up well though y: “She [Christy] dismisses her opponents as dykes to the press. The film frames this presentation as part of her personality and rise to fame rather than another element of Jim’s abuse. We aren’t given an opportunity to feel conflict in Christy’s success, because it doesn’t fit within the beats of the genre. When Christy is on top, the film doesn’t want us to question the cost.”
And while a ton of outlets quoted the 2022 article in The Guardian about Christy Martin’s abuse (after the release of her memoir, Fighting for Survival), not many dug deeper than the abuse presented in either that article or on screen in the biopic. However, in Netflix’s 2021 documentary, “Untold” Deal with the Devil, we learn from Christy Martin that Jim Martin encouraged her to insult her opponents’ sexuality and to use homophobic language in her trash talk. Yet, from day one, he threatened to out her if she didn’t comply with his orders. When Christy would tell him she was afraid there would be blowback for her trash talk if people learned the truth about her sexuality, he ignored her concerns.
Though the abuse in Christy was hard to watch, the movie was still pulling its punches when it came to the nature of the abuse. There was an opportunity to delve deeper into the web of control that Jim wove around Christy from day one that wasn’t taken. There were moments that had potential. When we first see Christy wake up the morning after she first sleeps with Jim, the toilet seat in his bathroom in the background is up. It’s his apartment and he hasn’t considered her at all. Later on in the movie, in the scene in their shared home where Jim attacks and hits Christy, we see that the toilet seat is still up. Jim sees this as his world, and Christy’s just another tool that’s supposed to serve him. Her feminine dress, her public image of being the housewife who does the cooking and the cleaning, all of that was about control, not just so she could make Jim money (because he controlled all the finances), but — if I can make this leap — it was also part of a pattern with abusers, where they pick apart a victim’s identity to see how far they can go, to not just alienate a victim from their friends and family and supports, but from themselves, too.
To me, it wasn’t just that Jim saw a potential meal ticket in Christy. It was also that he saw someone who could be isolated, who was far younger and greener than him. In the movie’s initial training montage, we see a hollow-eyed Jim Martin watching Christy jump rope. Her technique reminds me of mine before a friend at my Muay Thai gym pointed out that I was jumping rope “wrong” and that I should be just rotating my wrists instead of using my arms to whip the rope around. It feels like the moment is meant to show Jim’s exasperation with Christy’s untrained state, how far she has to go. In reality, though, he very likely saw her as someone he could completely mold any way he liked. It wasn’t that the relationship became abusive over time. It was abuse.
According to an ESPN article, the day before Jim proposed, he called Christy’s father and said he’d caught her with a woman. Christy’s sexuality wasn’t the drawback Jim made it out to be — it was the perfect opportunity for him to leverage blackmail. Not only that, but he used Christy’s feelings of rejection against her. According to Christy, “Jim would say, ‘Everybody hates you, you are out here alone.’ He made me feel it’s me against the world…It was evil, but it wasn’t altogether a lie. It was me against the world in a lot of ways.” The movie glosses over the marriage of convenience (as Christy saw it at the time) when it could have shown us more of the darkness lurking behind the ringless proposal.
The movie does do a decent job of showing us the misogyny and homophobia of the 1990s and even 2010s (those of us who were there and gay remember), how ready audiences, interviewers, and promoters were to play up Christy’s loyal wife routine. The movie shows her Jay Leno interview where she again trash talks her opponents’ sexuality, but I’m surprised it doesn’t look at her 1997 Late Show interview with Conan O’Brien. In it, the real Christy barely trash talks her opponent. She says she hates her, but then just makes a light quip insulting her outfit while wearing a pair of jeans with a hole in them. O’Brien laughs along with Christy at the idea of two fighters picking apart each other’s outfits as trash talk. But the interview also contains a discussion of domestic abuse played as a joke, something that — and again, I could be making a leap — Christy artfully plays along with while I think I see something showing in her eyes.
It’s apparently public knowledge at the time that the first time Jim met Christy, he told one of his fighters to break her ribs. In fact, it’s a story he tells himself. O’Brien asks Christy about marrying the guy who wanted to do that, and she asks, “Now what was I thinkin?” O’Brien continues with an eerie hypothetical, “When you go out with your husband, say, to the mall. Say you’ve had a fight, and you’ve got a big, black eye, you go to the mall or something with your husband, aren’t a lot of people going to assume that he hit you?” Christy replies, “of course, the first thing you think is, well, you know, what’s her boyfriend doin’ to her or her husband? But he has a plan for that, also. He makes me wear big, bumblebee sunglasses so no one can see my eyes, and, you know, that way he feels protected.” O’Brien plays along, “like those giant Yoko Ono windshield things.” Christy agrees and says, “now they’re looking at me for other reasons; they don’t know if I’m on drugs or what, that I’m tryin’ to hide my eyes, but you know, he feels safe anyway.” O’Brien laughs, “at least they think I’m on drugs, which is much better than having them think my husband hits me.” And Christy finishes things up with a weird sentiment: “exactly. In his mind, that’s a good sign.” Christy never says Jim doesn’t hit her, just that he has ways of feeling protected from others’ thinking (or knowing) he does.
As a fighter, I can tell you that size and situation matter. We see Christy lose to Laila Ali in the movie, and we also see her cheat at her weigh-in to qualify for the bout. Weight classes exist for a reason, and while a smaller fighter can definitely win against someone bigger, size is just such a huge advantage. Christy is 5’4½” and stands what appears to be a whole head below Jim’s towering height. Sure, he’s much older, but older boxers don’t get less strong, they just tend to get less fast. You still really do not want to catch a hit from any boxer who’s ever known how to hit. Boxing is a sport, and Christy is incredible at the sport. The ring, she says in the Netflix documentary, was the only place she found peace. But her success in the ring is not going to mean she is able to — or even mentally and emotionally willing to — defend herself at home. The movie really fails to explain this adequately for audiences who might not understand. It’s generally considered a bad idea to have a training relationship with someone you’re dating, and for good reason. You don’t want to mix hitting each other with romance.
A final aspect of the abuse the movie depicts but barely uncovers is Jim’s surveillance and creation of blackmail. He installed cameras throughout the house and only left Christy alone for two nights over their 20 year marriage. He went through her phone, read all her texts and emails, and knew essentially everything she ever said to anyone. Jim, in his arrogance, didn’t hide it either. Christy offered her gym to her hairdresser, Deana Gross, and according to the same ESPN article, “sometimes Gross would be working out and notice Jim scrolling through Martin’s phone while Martin was in the locker room or she’d catch him hovering by the whirlpool, watching Martin. Other times, Jim would follow Martin to the La Ti Da, sit in the parking lot and stare through the car window as she got her cut and color.” The abuse was there for others to see, and while we do see one person, Big Jeff, try to talk to Christy about the abuse multiple times, most people seem to ignore it even though it was obvious.
Big Jeff tells Christy that men at the gym had seen videos of her that Jim had shown them. The film shows us a disturbing scene, shown from the perspective of a hidden camera, where Jim calls Christy in from a dark hallway, revealing that she’s wearing athletic boxers with a realistic dildo poking out through the one leg like she has a dick. I really wish the movie had stayed there longer, shown us more of the sexual abuse — not for sensationalism sake, but to do justice to how devastating and persistent that kind of abuse can be. Jim got Christy addicted to cocaine, then meted out bumps for her. He essentially force-femmed her in public, and then, at home, as Christy says in “Untold,” he wanted her to wear a strap-on frequently. He made her push down her queerness and her masc-ness, and then he made her put it on as a performance for him and mocked her with it. Then, because blackmailing her with her sexuality wasn’t enough, he also threatened to release the video and images he’d taken of her and to show them to her family. Christy shows us a violence from Jim that most audiences will understand: his threatening to kill her if she leaves, his taking financial advantage of her and controlling every aspect of her life, his rageful outbursts and isolation tactics, and his ultimate final violent attempted murder of Christy. But the film also seems to not understand the link between Jim’s abuse of Christy and her sexuality.
But Jim Martin understood the world he was living in. In his trial, his defense argued that because Christy “hid” her sexuality, which they describe as bisexuality, she was untrustworthy. Christy’s mother didn’t believe her when she came to her for help. In the movie, we see Christy averting her eyes from the ring girls in bikinis when she’s in the locker room, but we don’t see the cumulative pain of sublimating your identity like that. Christy knew who she was, she understood she is a lesbian. She just felt she had to hide it to be successful and to be loved by her family.
Today, Christy Martin is a victim advocate. She volunteers in domestic violence shelters and shares her story in an effort to help people. Christy Martin isn’t afraid to answer the tired question of why she “didn’t leave.” She felt like she couldn’t — not only because he blackmailed her, isolated her, and controlled all her money — but also because Jim threatened to kill her and she believed him. When Christy went back home, she knew she was going to die. She had already called up or messaged her friends and family to say goodbye. They reported how unusual it was to receive an “I love you” from Christy out of the blue. We see resolve from Sweeney’s character in the movie, and the writing frames her return as her not backing down. In reality, Christy knew she was going back to face her death. For a movie with such uninspired fight scenes, it felt like it focused on the physical and overt aspects of abuse instead of the psychological, much to its detriment.
I’m honestly pretty tired of people who don’t fully understand abuse attempting to write it and portray it. I think the fight scenes could be forgivable if the movie wasn’t just splitting its time between punching in the gym, punching in the ring, and punching at home. I mean, I have to give it to them that it is kind of hard to show variety when the real-life Christy Martin was known for her early-in-the-match knockouts. But the movie went for tired inspirational sports movie beats when it could have shown us something so much deeper. The real Christy Martin isn’t afraid to talk about the psychological toll of her abuse. Again, from ESPN, “Even now in the shower, I get freaked out because I’m thinking somebody is watching me,” Christy says. “Domestic violence is about control. The bruises heal. But mentally? It never goes away.”
Sweeney tries her best to be inspirational Oscar-bait, but much like the lesbian swagger she fails to truly embody, she also just doesn’t look like someone who’s haunted by two decades of relentless surveillance, manipulation, and demeanment. Christy did make me cry, and it was fun to watch the boxing scenes, but I will probably never rewatch it.
SS refused to denounce white supremacy. i don’t think our community should be promoting the far right even if they sometimes portray lesbians
She didn’t understand why she even had to, and seemed offended at the suggestion that she did.