Film Festivals

The Last Gladiators (Director: Alex Gibney): Filmmaker Alex Gibney is clearly a very busy man. The Last Gladiators, in which he exam­ines the world of National Hockey League pugil­ists, focus­sing in on the story of former Montreal Canadiens enforcer Chris “Knuckles” Nilan, is his tenth fea­ture film since 2005, an unusu­ally pro­lific output for a doc­u­ment­arian. And you can add in a couple of shorter seg­ments he con­trib­uted to some other col­lab­or­ative doc­u­mentary pro­jects during that period. Gibney has a track record for matching the quantity with quality, as his latest film proves, even if it’s a depar­ture from the kind of politically-charged topics he’s best known for, such as the down­fall of politi­cians (Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer and Casino Jack and the United States of Money), cor­porate mal­feas­ance (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room), and American mil­itary tor­ture (Taxi to the Dark Side, which won an Oscar in 2008 for best doc­u­mentary fea­ture). But as a lifelong hockey fan, Gibney, an American, saw rich source material in examining the sub­cul­ture of one of the most con­tro­ver­sial aspect of Canada’s game, with Nilan’s own intriguing story providing about 75% of the film’s content.

Retiring in 1992 after being plagued by injuries (he’s under­gone 26 sur­geries), Nilan’s most not­able achieve­ments from his 13 year NHL career are more than 3,000 pen­alty minutes, a Stanley Cup win with the Canadiens in 1986, and a selec­tion to Team USA for the 1987 Canada Cup series. After being drafted by Montreal, he played nine sea­sons for them before being traded to the New York Rangers and even­tu­ally his hometown Boston Bruins, before ending his career back with Montreal. Nilan’s pride and love for the Canadiens still runs deep and it seems as if he never got over the dev­ast­a­tion of being traded away from them. His troubled post-NHL his­tory, which proves to be the most sub­stantive part of the film, could make Nilan the poster child for pro ath­letes who struggle with their post-playing lives. A toxic com­bin­a­tion of sub­stance abuse (alcohol, pre­scrip­tion paink­illers, and heroin), employ­ment prob­lems (Nilan hated the insur­ance job he worked at), and legal troubles (including a 2009 arrest for shoplifting) des­troyed his rela­tion­ship with his wife and child and nearly killed him. Nilan, who has a very dark and intense side, may be a rough-around-the-edges char­acter, but he’s still a like­able one. Part of his appeal is his blunt hon­esty, open­ness, and a will­ing­ness to take full respons­ib­ility for his fail­ings. Interviews with his father who, like his son, pro­jects a hard-ass demeanour and speaks with that always-fascinating thick Boston accent, add real emo­tional depth to the film, as the senior Nilan holds little back in con­veying the pro­found heartache and shame he felt (and still feels) over his son’s struggles.

The non-Nilan por­tions of the film find Gibney tra­cing the evol­u­tion of the enforcer’s role in the game from its mid-70s heyday with the Philadelphia Flyers’ “Broad Street Bullies” through to its greatly dimin­ished need in the cur­rent game. Numerous inter­views with the most prom­inent fighters over the past couple of dec­ades provide insight into the enforcer mindset, with players like Marty McSorley, Tony Twist, Donald Brashear, and the late Bob Probert weighing in (Probert’s inter­views, con­ducted shortly before his death, are sad to watch). The scenes with Brashear are sad for a dif­ferent reason, as we see the former fan favourite playing in D-list hockey league games and still itching to drop his gloves.

The Last Gladiators is a timely piece in light of the recent deaths of three NHL enfor­cers that called into ques­tion the pos­sible link between their occu­pa­tions and its neg­ative residual effects on their lives. Nilan, who I heard give an inter­view on Toronto’s Prime Time Sports radio show the week before The Last Gladiators’ TIFF premiere, dis­counted the con­nec­tion. Nilan’s stance appar­ently escaped the atten­tion of TV’s Hockey Night in Canada neander­thal Don Cherry, who cri­ti­cized him and two other former fighters (also without basis) on the tele­cast for sup­porting the sup­posed theory.

Gibney, who began filming a gen­eral por­trait of hockey fighters, chose wisely in deciding to make Nilan the central sub­ject. The Last Gladiators is con­sist­ently grip­ping and only mis­fires when the dir­ector chooses some dis­ap­point­ingly obvious music on the soundtrack (Steppenwolf’s “Born To Be Wild”) or engages in unne­ces­sary scene re-enactments to advance his nar­rative, drag­ging the doc­u­mentary into cheesy E! True Hollywood Story ter­ritory. Being a hockey fan isn’t even a neces­sary com­ponent in appre­ci­ating the film, as I haven’t given a toss about the NHL since the inept Toronto Maple Leafs killed my love for the game in the mid-90s.

Tagged as: #tiff11, hockey, sports

{ Comments on this entry are closed }