Creed III: Affection, Inspiration and Hope

Friends,

Last night, as Austin, Texas skies, lightening-lit with torrential rain and wind contemplated whether to play host to tornadoes, another force of nature played out on the screen of the warm and welcoming darkened theater of Austin Film Society.  I was invited by my precious, racial justice educator daughter (ostensibly arranged by my film-devotee son who writes for AFS) to a pre-release screening of Michael P. Jordan’s directorial debut of Creed III.  It was brilliant!

I sat in the aisle seat next to my daughter near the front in a row filled with beautiful and accomplished Black young men.  The elder of the assembled tribe, I was grateful to share this cinematic next-gen of Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky legacy with these precious dream catchers and my daughter.  Last night recalled the electrifying experience of 1976, when I a one-year postgraduate of high school, sat in a similar darkened theatre and watched Stallone make his writing, and acting debut in Rocky I.  Creed III, co-written by Keenan and Ryan Coogler and Zach Baylin deserves to be the grandchild of the exhilaratingly, vulnerable and beloved Rocky I.

Sylvester Stallone, who produced Creed III, has passed the torch to Jordan, the Cooglers, and Baylin to tell the age-old story of young men struggling to outrun, poverty, slums, and treacherous streets to find identity, through athletic prowess. In Creed III this storyline moved from the Italian hood of Philadelphia to the streets of Los Angeles where Black and Latinx hopefuls emerge.   

Michael P. Jordan’s direction is splendid.  The boxing scenes---sight and sound are brutal portrayals of human bucks’ horns locked in territorial, survival-of-the-fittest combat.  The bravado, force, impact, speed, timing, and focus on the knock-down-and-out punch agonizingly draws the audience into and momentarily away from the vicious action on the screen. The cinematography is graphic but, beautiful and the choreography imaginatively synchronizes each blow, grunt, and passionate exhalation.   Especially, poignant is the boxing sequence (I will not spoil the plot) toward the end of the movie that isolates the two boxers from the crowd.

Michael P. Jordan, as Adonis Creed (Little Donnie), gives a heart-wrenching portrayal of a guilt-ridden little boy housed in a powerful, chiseled man-body, terrified to face his childhood trauma, whose demons have driven him to one interpretation of success.  His gentle eyes reveal the entire emotional gamut of the man-child struggle. 

And, Texan, Jonathan Major, as Damien Robinson (Diamond Dame) is magnificent. That face tells it all!  Major’s facial expression and body posture paint a portrait of every man, every Black man, who bears the scars of dreams deferred.  Major introduces the audience to Damien, a tortured soul, incarcerated in a magnificently fashioned body, hunched over in quasi-humility with notes of shame.  And, in nanosecond timing throughout the film, Major paints the portrait of a man engulfed in bitterness, who vacillates between wonderment, confusion, shame, guilt, torture, rage, and intense vulnerability.  

Oh, that face: eyes, swollen, sunken from years of grief his forehead furrowed and then at the precise moment, un-furrowed, brows lifted to reveal a flash of bravado and rage is both agonizing and dazzlingly brilliant!   

This is a redemption story that reveals the depth of the Biblical truth: “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”

Creed III is storytelling at its best.  And, gathered in the lobby of the theater after the screening, with the assembled tribe of young adults buzzing with excitement and profound articulations of their insights from the film, I felt deep affection, inspiration, and hope, as I do this morning surrounded by Austin skies, blue and clear after a tumultuous storm. 

With Agape,

Pastor jen