Girlfight: Introducing Michelle Rodriguez

Pre-release pieces from the 2000 release of Karyn Kusama's debut feature

Girlfight.

With the Christmas release of Rachel Morrison’s The Fire Inside, from a script by Barry Jenkins, Karyn Kusama’s Girlfight comes to mind. Here’s a couple of pieces from 2000, including my Time Out New York cover interview with Michelle Rodriguez. Rodriguez's presence was undeniable, almost unnerving: at that moment a quarter-century ago, I could hope for a decades-long career for her. The cover story for Time Out New York was under editor Joe Angio. The review from Cinema Scope was edited by Mark Peranson. Both are slightly edited.

It's unseasonably, swelteringly hot at the Toronto Film Festival for one last presentation of Karyn Kusama's intense boxing romance, and 22-year-old Michelle Rodriguez is the coolest character in town, despite all the attention being paid to her ardent, emotional debut performance. Before an hour of conversation at the beigely swank Four Seasons, she's the most relaxed soul in a suite full of harried publicists, haphazardly juggling photographers and journalists. In jeans and combat boots, joking around, Rodriguez hardly seems the lean fighting machine of Girlfight. One publicist tells her she seems pretty relaxed. Like most things, she finds that funny. "What is it," she asks, "Most of these actors start as regular people, but turn into robots?"

A little later, in her hotel room overlooking the city, a week before she gets the IFP Gotham Breakthrough Actor Award, she's about as human as it gets, cheerful and slangy yet articulate. She says her computer chess game on the nightstand has been "kicking her ass." Three scripts in William Morris binders rest on her desk beside a pile of trade paperback novels and a copy of "Decoding Your Genes" from the Dummies series. She drapes herself over an overstuffed armchair, pulls out a Dunhill and I fumble, happy myself, for a match.

On screen, Rodriguez's Diana is a performance you can't imagine another actor surpassing. She simmers, explodes. She is sullen, yet suggests reserves of potential. As Kusama puts it, Rodriguez has the gift of "being complex and defiantly herself." She grew up in diverse circumstances in Texas, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and finally with her mother in Jersey City. "I've had a lot of exposure to different facets of life," she says, "from being well off to having just the basics. I'm very grateful for that. It makes me open-minded."

But many interviewers have assumed she's the same as Diana in the movie. "C'mon, being Spanish, I say Jersey City, they automatically assume, 'welfare recipient!' Pathetic labels. I just pity them." She affects a comic voice. "They do not know where I shall be in a couple of years!"

Rodriguez says she has many aspirations, including writing. "I'm very passionate about expressing myself, very loudly, before I die," she says, with another husky laugh. Still, she's patient. "I just want to get a taste of Hollywood and see exactly if there is any way to either work with this system or some way around it. I really want to educate myself. I have a lot of beliefs behind me. It gets political, and when you get political, it's hard on you when you fuck up. I really want to be able to work with the system, because there's no way to beat it at this point. It seems almost impossible, and I don't even believe in that word. I've got big..." A pause. A laugh. "Issues!" She continues, "That's why I think it was so easy for me to become an actress, because my goals are so much higher."

The training it took to become a competent boxer elevated her goals further. "The disciplinary aspect of it really got to me. Training was four-and-a-half months. That's a gift in independent film." She says she was hit in the face a couple of times, another great preparation for working in the indie world. "The only times I got hit in the face was when I was doing the scenes with professional boxers. They're kind of used to hitting people and they get in the moment! Just imagine sneezing with your eyes closed and a lack of oxygen for a second there and you've got the impact."

Acting was more a matter of lowering her impact. "Basically, I'm very animated and [my acting coach] had to teach me how to internalize, to do an 'all-in-the-eyes' kind of thing.'You can not say something and not really move rambunctiously and still get the point across. I had to analyze myself, become kind of like a narcissist for a couple of days and look at myself in the mirror and analyze how I show emotion. It was weird!"

It was a completely unexpected turn for this high school dropout. She had been working as an extra in movies for over a year, but didn't see that as a ticket out of Jersey City. As for acting, she says, "I didn't have the confidence to go to an audition and have somebody judge me. I can't even say it's confidence, it's just the fact that you're walking into this place and someone is telling you what you can or can't do in five seconds or ten minutes of talking to you. I didn't want to be put in that position." She was Rollerblading through Washington Square Park two years ago, picked up a copy of a Backstage at a nearby newsstand and saw an ad for an open call in midtown, looking for tough young Latina actresses. "I got there a couple hours late and there were like 350 people there, people I knew from working in the extra field. I'm PMSing, it's like, whatever. I got lucky! Karyn just kept talking about some rawness she saw. I wasn't pretending. I was very... me, y'know."

Girlfight.

She's not impressed with most of the scripts she sees now that she's proven herself. "It kind of makes you want to be a sellout, use the marketing formula, just make tons of cash and then be real. But it's like, once a sellout, always a sellout. People won't take you seriously, those people you really want to reach who would be activated by your positive message, they won't be there for you anymore!" She laughs. "It's hard, dude."

Currently, she's acting in a Universal release about street racing, as Vin Diesel's girlfriend. "It's cool, the other actors are letting me into their guy-guy world. I just ignore the girls in like their hoochie-mama getups. I kind of enjoy the feminizing of myself, If that's what you call wearing a little punk-chick leather miniskirt." She keeps her own looks in perspective. "What is so beautiful is that I'm not Claudia Schiffer, I'm not like some beautiful broad coming in here and acting with beauty. It's not like I've got glammed-out beauty on my side. What I like about the fact that Karyn chose me is that it's about time we really started looking for talent instead of looks. All these beautiful people you see, they don't leave their house without the makeup artist slabbing on pounds of makeup. It's very rare that you find a chick who's naturally beautiful in Hollywood. It's a thing many people don't take into consideration, they always see someone who's flawless in all this publicity, they assume it's not PhotoShop, they assume it's not the makeup job. You don't always have to be attracted to a person to enjoy their company and that's something Hollywood hasn't learned yet."

But she wouldn't mind becoming a female action hero in the meantime. "That's a childhood fetish of mine. I always wondered why I related to the guys in action films more than I related to the female.

“I was always the girl in Jersey City who was like the big tomboy, considered the butch, because I was, like, so masculine. I was always wearing the same clothes, a tank top and a pair of baggy jeans with my boxers coming out. It was my defense, y'know, against being considered that sexy person that guys would try to get laid by. So instead, they just considered me one of the guys. Until I started growing boobs! I was never shy about my body. I was a very weird-looking teenager, but I was okay with that."

And the romance in the movie was as new to her as the punching and ducking. "I've never been in love before. I'm lucky if I last more than two months with a person. I guess I just used friendships in life, the need for attention, the need for security, the need for an ear. I just used that craving we have for a certain type of comfort and tried to focus all of that on this one guy who's really great and sweet."

Rodriguez says that the lack of self-consciousness Kusama admired in her boils down to a simple gift. "The best thing for me to do is to zone out and be totally internalized and be attuned to my body and let it all out. Aggression? If that's what I'm focused on, that's what will come out me. But it's like you don't exist, no one exists, unless I'm acting with someone. That's how I felt when I was in the ring. It was just me against my body. Whoever was in front of me? You are only a target."

Girlfight.

You've seen it all before.

But no, not truly. Critics often jibe that a story or plot is not fresh. I hate that. Time to leave the film festival bar. Because one person has seen permutations of a tale is no reason to presume someone else has. Critics see lots of movies, worse than the worst couch potatoes. (Perhaps I exaggerate.)

Karyn Kusama's Girlfight has made the festival circuit, from Sundance to Cannes to Toronto, and smaller fests as well, and it's sparked the basic forms of discussion, but it possesses an emotional ferocity, a narrative polish, and an attentiveness to gesture and an actor's charisma that is rare and thrilling.

Diana (Michelle Rodriguez, in her first film) is a restless, streetwise high school senior. She lives in a Red Hook, Brooklyn housing project with her brother and single father. Her mother died in circumstances we only slowly learn of, a bit of psychologizing that is sketchier than the rest of the neatly implied narrative. Her brother's the family geek, but dad wants him to box. Diana wants to learn, too, but her father won't pay the tab. She starts her own regimen, then makes deals with the gym's trainer, and her secret training eventually leads to her transformation into the gym's first female victor. But just as she discovers herself as an athlete, and as an adult, she meets Adrian (Jamie Tirelli), another young boxer, who, gulp, might just be a soulmate.

At the Sundance festival awards ceremony, where Girlfight won the Grand Jury Prize and Directing Award, Rodriguez was all smiles, a charming, gorgeous young woman. On screen, she is fierce and incendiary. Once an amateur, her performance in Girlfight is all-pro. She's the key find that puts the movie across. Her intensely knit, querulous brow and her softly husky voice are yet another emblem of the kismet of casting. Alternately angry and hopeful, Rodriguez's Diana is a performance you can't imagine another actor surpassing. Rodriguez simmers, explodes. She is sullen, yet suggests reserves of potential—for accomplishment or for self-destruction, or for the tentative happiness that the final scenes confer on her with a minimum of fuss.

Girlfight.

Kusama is a protégé of John Sayles (who co-produces), and her work as writer-director in Girlfight suggests that veteran maverick's enterprises. Yet while it would be easy (and wrong) to reduce Girlfight to Rocky retooled for a young woman, Kusama's debut plays as a jumpier edition of Sayles' concerns. They share working class protagonists, earnest but unschooled, who talk, then perform themselves into a new understanding of themselves. The telling is taut and limber. Movies ineluctably suggest fate and destiny, because they're finite narratives. Is the ending happy, sappy, or tentative, perhaps only momentarily uplifting? Diana's moments of happiness are hard-won, and as in real life, things grow more complex, once the lights go up, and we return to life and the characters seep into our memory. Predestined endings are part of the stuff of myth, and in under two hours, redemption, or the spectacle of life or love or good intentions dashed will remain necessary and worthwhile subject matter.

Kusama's dialogue is never less than serviceable and usually playfully fresh in the mouths of her characters, even a line like, "Oh, please don't front me like a girlie-girl when you know I'm not!" And there are Saylesian jibes: "This neighborhood didn't catch on with the lawyer types." (Ah, to recognize one's place and how others are beyond it and that perhaps you can be as well.) But then there is the trainer's grumble, "You don't sweat for me, you're out of my life." Or when her secret training is revealed to her best girlfriend at high school: "You. Are. Crazy!" There is a beat and then, celebration and assent: "My crazy friend!"

Diana even finds an absurd but wondrous love. What would be the weirdest thing to occur if amateur boxing allowed men and women to box? Love. There is a scene between Diana and Adrien in the ring that should not work but sings of the guileless racing of the heart: listen as Rodriguez rasps, "I love you, I really do." She is close enough to bite off Adrien's ear and when the clench breaks all they are supposed to do is batter, batter away at one another. Love? Fucking? Relationships? A death match, whichever it may be.

There are sneaky lifts throughout, ranging from Rodriguez' mad, rolled eyes, head down at gaze level, as if from Kubrick's The Shining and other films, or the dusky light of the beaten-down training gym, lit by fluorescence, building unexpected patches of background illumination that punch out of shallow gloom, similar to certain 1970s films, such as John Huston's gloom-burnished boxing saga, Fat City. And the fights are simple and effective: whether by choice or budgetary constraints, Kusama does not estheticize the game.

Kusama's eclectic, impassioned, straightforward love story suggests a cool eye and a warm heart, with feelings for life as much as for movies.

A version of this review appeared in Cinema Scope 4. Girlfight is Criterion edition #1219.