Mike Tyson was formidable in the ring, a sweaty, one-man wrecking crew whose iron fists pumped like twin jackhammers. But after claiming the heavyweight crown, his fearsome reputation outside the ring began to eclipse his fame as a fighter. His first wife accused him of emotional abuse on a tabloid TV show as he sat by her side, jaws tightly set. Their acrimonious divorce played out in public. A few years later he was convicted of rape and imprisoned for three years. And that only seemed to make him angrier.
Documentary director James Toback's remarkable film, simply called Tyson, allows one of America's most controversial athletes to speak his mind. Formally, Toback is in league with Errol Morris for creatively structuring his material. Old television footage of Tyson's fights, the colors faded to deep russet, is integrated into long-running interviews with the boxer, some of them split into triple screens. At moments Tyson's voice is a little off from screen to screen, as if capturing what the one-time champ calls "the makeup of the mind... the madness... the chaos of the brain." Unlike the recent plague of amateur documentarians who insert themselves into the story, Toback is neither seen nor heard. The focus is on the subject, his history and his own interpretation of its meaning.
In Tyson's remarkably articulate if feverish account, he was a sickly child who learned to fight in the streets of Brooklyn to survive. "I'm afraid of being physically humiliated again," he says in a wheezy voice, implying that the memory of being robbed at gunpoint in grade school is as indelible as the Maori warrior tattoos he commissioned for his face after his rape sentence. Lacking his father and surrounded by crime and poverty, he was in trouble with the law early and learned boxing in reform school. As a teenager the gruff but kindly impresario Cus D'Amato, a surrogate father who imposed a Zen-like discipline on the fighter, mentored him. Sadly, D'Amato died shortly before Tyson emerged as the rising star of professional boxing in the '80s. Perhaps, Tyson indicates, D'Amato's guiding influence might have curbed some of his anger, channeling it against the jaws of his competitors. The boxer readily admits to murderous instincts.
The one legitimate criticism of Toback could be that the director doesn't weigh Tyson's words against outside sources. The boxer accuses his showboat ex-manager, Don King, of robbing him blind, but no rebuttal is given. He calls the person who accused him of rape as "that wretched swine of a woman," denying the charges, but Toback never alludes to the evidence that convicted him. In the end it doesn't matter. The documentary is an artfully compelling look into the damaged life of its subject, not an exercise in news reporting. It presents Tyson's face to the world and allows the viewers to make of him what they will.
