Creed – Giving Thanks to Rocky 40 Years Later

The first frame of the original Rocky, as the famous music comes up, the date: November 25, 1975. You probably had to live through the Rocky phenomenon to understand just how big that movie was, what it gave audiences, and why it won the Best Picture Oscar in 1976, besting All the President’s Men, Network, Taxi Driver and Bound for Glory. What most people don’t realize about that year looking back was that Sylvester Stallone – the unlikely lottery winner of that year – never won an Oscar, even though he wrote the script for Rocky.

How could he have beaten William Goldman for All the President’s Men or Paddy Chayefsky for Network? He couldn’t have. Both of those films, and Taxi Driver, launched a thousand filmmakers. A generation of filmmakers wanted to make movies that good, that revered. People like me spent many hours lamenting Rocky’s Best Picture win over the other, presumably better movies. That it won was a thing that the movie forever had to live down.

What those of us who did the complaining neglected to realize is that movies are not made for critics. They’re not made for Oscar bloggers who nitpick their choices. They aren’t made for narcissistic film industry professionals. They’re made for people out there.  Rocky deserved to win Best Picture not because it would prove the most lasting, not because it was the highest achievement from an artistic perspective, but because for most people it was the Movie of the Year. It changed real lives. It made people happy. It did what movies are supposed to do. That kind of magic is rarely captured. Now, November 25, 2015 a full 40 years later, Ryan Coogler has brought that magic back. He didn’t do it by remaking Rocky. He did it by telling an original story that works with or without the Rocky/Apollo Creed origin story.

Creed is such a good idea it’s hard to figure out why it hasn’t been made before – why no one ever thought to change the dynamic of what blue collar rags to riches could really look like. Because Coogler knows the Rocky legend so well and assumes we do too, he doesn’t spend a lot of time explaining it to us. Rather, he moves through exposition quickly, smartly, focusing instead on the story of Creed’s forgotten son, Adonis, played by Michael B. Jordan. Bounced in and out of foster care, with no guidance and no parental support, Adonis is rescued by Apollo’s wife, played by Phylicia Rashad. The kid can’t stop fighting so he can’t be placed until she takes him in. He’s a good kid and isn’t ever made to be a bad one, not one who needs “correcting” by anybody. He just needs a little support until he figures out that he was born to fight, which he eventually does.

The original Rocky planted thousands of seeds that turned into dreams in far reaching places all over the country. Some of those dreams came true. Most probably did not. But that was okay because they had Rocky – an unlikely nobody whose dreams came true in a movie one time.

Who would have figured that making Rocky would lead to Rocky II which would be a film Ryan Coogler’s father watched repeatedly, showing it to his wife and then to his young son. Why Rocky II? No cineaste could give a damn about that movie since they could barely give a damn about Rocky.  But this kid did. He’s now turned that seed, that dream, that unlikely aftershock of a sequel of a Best Picture winner into a new movie – the 7th film in the Rocky saga and one of the best of the year, Creed.

Creed works because the film keeps it about the relationship between Adonis Creed and Rocky Balboa, brought back with tenderness by Sylvester Stallone, the beating heart of this film, one of the best reasons to see it, and the biggest surprise of it. Coogler could have made this story without Rocky. He has enough material with the mesmerizing Jordan as a young boxer on the rise. But in bringing back Rocky he’s mining his own relationship with his father by paying tribute to what his father loved. The relationship between these two lost souls is so utterly moving you might find yourself weeping throughout, as I did. They are two lonely men who find each other and become each other’s unlikely family. It would not have worked without these two actors playing it so honestly.

The actors and the director rescue what could have been a film riddled with cliches and fighter film tropes.  The tenderness Stallone brought to the first Rocky returns again here. Coogler also notes the tenderness and sweetness of Rocky and Adrien’s relationship in the first film and revives that, too, with Jordan and newcomer Tessa Thompson (in a well-written supporting female role, for a change).  Stallone’s humility is really what drives his performance, easily among the year’s standouts.

The film’s truly exceptional moments come from its fight scenes, which will surely elevate Coogler from the pack as a director. Working with cinematographer Maryse Alberti the camera brings us right into the fight in some of the best filmmaking to ever capture the sport. Coogler has probably spent many years imagining just how he would film those scenes and that focus and concentration has paid off. They will leave you breathless.

The 1970s are being brought back on a wave of nostalgia this year. Is it because movies have stopped making a difference in the lives of people the way they used to? Is it because Hollywood has been so focused on telling stories of white Americans they kind of forgot that it’s a bigger world out there? Creed isn’t a film that focuses on Race. The idea of being black or white isn’t ever really brought up because in this world it doesn’t seem to matter anymore.  What matters is what has always mattered in the Rocky universe. Someone who is underestimated by everybody gets their one shot.

Creed shows what Ryan Coogler can really do as a filmmaker. While much of it was there in evidence with Fruitvale Station, in Coogler’s debut it was much more restrained, as though he was afraid of going overboard, doing too much. But here, he blazes behind the camera, shooting the fight scenes with a kind of energy that hasn’t really been seen since Scorsese did it with Raging Bull.

There are a hundred different ways Creed could have gone wrong. There are also going to be plenty of poker faced critics judging it by standards that really only matter to them. There is no way any one person can explain to you what it feels like to sit down and watch a film like this. It’s just that, simply, sometimes the magic comes.

Creed is as much a celebration of the Rocky mythology as it is a celebration of boxing films, and of movies overall – how they have the power to transport us far from where we sit and into a dream machine reserved for the big screen, a dark theater, and those who wander in from lives that could never compare. Those of us brought to this place, with the soft seats and the smell of popcorn, sometimes get the chance to be reminded why people make movies at all. It could be to make money. It could be to win awards. It could be to make careers. Or it could be to dance with the muse, to capture a drifting flame that, when captured, burns brightly. That is what Coogler has done with Creed. He’s made what my friend David Carr used to call a “movie movie.”  And in so doing he’s memorialized the film that caused such a stir 40 years ago, rescued it from the depths of sequel hell, and given it a fresh voice for a new generation of kids who are sorely in need of new heroes.