welcome to my new series on here, to all the auteurs i’ve loved before. this isn’t the first time i’ve started a substack series and i’m pretty bad at committing to them. but this one seems like it’ll stick, especially cause i’m getting lots of inspiration lately. it stems from a realization i had recently that multiple filmmakers who made films which shaped my taste in the mid-to-late 2010s, around the time i came of age and really began getting into cinema, have suddenly been putting things out around the same time. it’s interesting to view their work in the context of my tastes having changed and become more fully formed in the past decade, as well as my life experiences as a whole, and also seeing how their filmmaking has or hasn’t changed, especially in the completely different filmmaking climate we are in across the world. thus was born to all the auteurs i’ve loved before…, not a simple nostalgia trip, but an exploration of who i am now as a filmgoer and a person. i’m going to be very brutally honest about my experience with these artists, my blindspots, my assumptions, and whether i get stuff wrong or not, i don’t care, because above all else this series is personal. it’s mine and i get to make the rules lol. that means i’ll probably extend this past just director auteurs too… we’ll see.
anyway, here’s the inaugural entry: on benny safdie’s the smashing machine (2025). spoilers for this film along with good time (2017) and uncut gems (2019) incoming for those who’d like to be warned.
i’d planned to have a piece on the discourse du jour, one battle after another, completed a few weeks ago. in retrospect that would have been an incredible start to this series, considering how much pta meant to me as a budding cinephile. but life got in the way, and eventually i learned that basically everything i wanted to cover about the film had already been covered, ranging from those who think it’s a masterpiece to those who despise it. maybe someday down the line, after the dust has settled, i’ll want to revisit that piece. but for now, apologies to those my gemini lying ass told about it lol.
strangely, i suddenly found my attention fixated on a less discussed new release, and a much worse one: benny safdie’s the smashing machine, starring dwayne “the rock” johnson himself alongside jungle cruise co-star emily blunt, about the pioneering ufc fighter mark kerr and his on-and-off relationship with dawn staples. in my eyes, the film is a failure, mind you, but a fascinating one, continuing both safdie brothers’ experiments with blurring the lines between reality and fiction, to mixed but productive results, especially when viewed in tandem with the first film covering this subject, john hyams’ 2002 documentary of the same name.
besides that 2002 film, there were a few key factors on my mind going into the imax theater for the smashing machine:
1) six years on from the immense commercial success of uncut gems, and the behind-the-scenes sexual assault on the sets of their films by their usual producer having been unearthed, the next moves from benny and josh were bound to be scrutinized, for good reason. how would they move on? rumors are abound on whether the two brothers are on good terms or not; i’m not here to parasocially investigate their personal lives, but it is fascinating that josh took his time putting out marty supreme, receiving frequent collaborators ronald bronstein and electronic music legend daniel lopatin in the divorce (as well as uncut gems dp darius khondji, a legend in his own right, and a fascinating chameleon who i’m surprised to see hitch his star to the safdie project), and delivering something which seems from the trailer to exemplify the safdie brand. the only thing of note he did in the meantime was direct a (really good!) sandman comedy special. whether those years of preparation paid off is for another piece upon marty supreme’s release, dear reader.
meanwhile, benny stayed active, albeit primarily lending his talents as a character actor to films from christopher nolan, paul thomas anderson, and kelly fremon craig, among others. the only substantial auteur project he took on in the meantime was nathan fielder’s the curse miniseries, which he helped write and played a main role in. on that, former uncut gems camera operator maceo bishop was promoted to dp, and he stuck with benny for the smashing machine. it may seem like benny got the raw deal in the split, but there’s still precedence for the safdie style to be carried on with him.
also of note is that both brothers got to keep their opportunistic distributor a24 and high-profile producer eli bush. maybe there really was nothing wrong between them? or on the part of a24: don’t put all your eggs in one basket, as the old adage goes.
2) this is also meant to be some kind of comeback for the rock, a proof of his acting talents and a play for awards viability. he acquired the rights to mark kerr’s life story in 2019, which is around when he approached benny, who didn’t actually start writing until 2023. however long it took, he objectively made the right choice in picking a safdie brother, who with rpatz in good time and the sandman in uncut gems - and to a certain extent emma stone and nathan fielder in the curse too i assume? i also never caught that lol - took household names and placed them into a completely unusual context for them, bringing them into the “grit” and “muck” of the safdies’ constructed view of the world, testing the ability of the audience to identify with them. in addition to all this, the rock has experience with the world of professional fighting sports, and resembles the real-life kerr a decent amount, so the casting is a no-brainer.
3) now, i came of age as a cinephile right around when good time and uncut gems dropped in 2017 and 2019 respectively. as i mentioned above, that’s all the safdie experience i have other than a few loosie short films here and there. say what you will about those films’ attempts at verisimilitude, whether there is enough specificity to their recreations of certain time periods, or if their formalism goes beyond simply imitating altman and cassavetes. it’s been a while, but i do remember both films ultimately working best through cutting and dialogue to put you into the shoes of their main characters, the “thrill ride” pacing and sensory overload of the movies feeling like a natural extension of the interiority which rpatz and adam sandler communicate. it’s old-school craft, sure, but the way they deliver it remains a unique fixture of the 2010s in popular filmmaking, almost seemingly actively trying to match shortened attention spans of a technology generation. the period detail is only a bonus to situate these characters in the nightmare of their making, and i recall, even with how cynical good time and uncut gems are as films, you get so swept up that there’s no blunting the emotional impact of that final fall from the balcony/the shot of the police car in the former or the surprise shooting which ends off the latter.
after much table-setting, i finally get to the question i’ve been meaning to ask: does benny safdie achieve any of that on his own? well… it’s complicated.
this is a strange case where it seems as though it’s very much intended not just as a companion piece to that documentary, with hyams himself listed as a consulting producer, but also some sort of replacement, as the original is somewhat hard to watch (through legal means, anyway. wink wink.) not only has the title been carried over, but safdie has structured the script around interviews and conversations directly carried over from the doc as well, some of them line for line and scenario for scenario being the exact same, while other interview conversations have been translated into fictional back-and-forths between characters. for accuracy’s sake this makes sense, as the documentary was clearly a part of mark and dawn’s real life. but rather than fold that aspect into the script, perhaps making the viewer aware of the presence of a documentary crew, for example, benny instead chooses to adopt a documentarian’s point of view himself.
i’ll admit i haven’t seen the safdies’ prior attempts at documentary filmmaking - namely lenny cooke, which seems an important precursor to this one due to its focus on an undersung athlete - so i can’t fully comment on how that side of benny has evolved. but i guess he can: in his recent DGA conversation with his oppenheimer director christopher nolan, safdie talks about his and josh’s approach in lenny cooke as being based around moments in cooke’s life that were briefly captured rather than extensive footage, and how they had to put those moments together in such a way to communicate character detail and broader ideas and emotions (i’m paraphrasing here). he tells nolan he adopted a similar approach with this film, wanting to act like he and the camera were in every scene, and build out ideas from the most natural points of view. he then plays with the truth, adding elements from the documentary as well as shifting them around as a kind of test for himself to see whether he can still meet a bar of reality, and to amplify certain central details of who mark and dawn are - for example, adding dawn into a scene where she wasn’t present in the documentary in order to show how her lack of communication with mark manifests before a fight. which i think is a fascinating way to approach what’s ostensibly going to seem like a conventional sports biopic.
but there are some key flaws to the way this film applies these filmmaking principles. the safdies’ applications of verisimilitude in the past always felt somewhat aware of the ways in which they aren’t recreating reality, and the tension between the two modes feels pronounced enough to inherently be why the scenes work. for example, the use of the weeknd and kevin garnett in uncut gems as exaggerated personas, their worst qualities coming to the forefront of their performances to the point where who they are in real-life and who they are in the film blurs. with this film, in attempting to place you into the world of mark kerr as accurately as possible, scenes never go beyond feeling like hollow recreations of what the documentary already established. for as much went under the surface of the 2002 film, it at least through essayistic cutting as well as its revealing talking head interviews managed to communicate every aspect of kerr’s life, and how by all respects he was a really kind man who got out his most violent urges through the ring and used drugs to handle the fallout. by basically doing what the documentary did but within a fictional context, benny can’t seem to figure out how to present these events in any way other than the objective, leaving a good chunk of the runtime feeling somewhat bereft of ideas or variation. he then has to draw on his love of classic sports cinema to fill in the gaps; telegraphing the most obvious aspects of performance to tell us the same things as the hyams film, but less efficiently. the observational point of view he takes, as marked by the long lenses he and bishop use in almost every scene, is forced to be broken up by the invented melodramatic aspects he adds on in order to give us any meaning, which defeats the purpose of the whole approach.
for as good as the rock’s performance is - and i will admit, he is quite good, with his physicality and the way it’s subverted on and off the ring, the little details in his mannerisms, the oscillations between rage and affability - the construction of benny’s film around him lets him down. multiple scenes go by where you are meant to observe kerr in his natural habitat, but ultimately after some time of nothing happening you get a big showy performance moment and then the scenes end and you only have the most basic conclusions to draw. benny seems to want to cover just as much ground as the documentary, but in these brief flashes of nothing he can’t draw the same full pictures of these people. kerr’s best friend/fellow fighter mark coleman, his coach bas rutten (played by his real self relishing the chance to be 20 years younger again, a classic safdie casting moment), his rival fighters - none of them come off as real, just blips who pass through kerr’s life.
one big deviation safdie takes from the 2002 film is the amplification of dawn staples’ presence, who admittedly barely seems to show up in that original film. it’s a valiant effort to give that relationship more time, as it clearly was important to how kerr handled his addiction, and the passive-aggressive ways in which his anger was thrown at her. but so much of the drama here feels invented to the point of seeming self-parody… blunt, like johnson, does her best, but i think benny’s love of films like raging bull (i think he clearly uses it as a model here) affects these scenes negatively. each argument is started and performed in the most unnatural way (a seeming consequence of benny’s strict structuring of the arguments which he talks about with nolan), and in his attempts to portray the complexities of a toxic relationship like theirs, he just makes them both seem very unflattering. mark as cruel and weird in his calm passive-aggressive behavior, dawn as shrill and violent. one could certainly pull off scenes like this - again, see raging bull - but in leaning into poorly delivered melodrama to prove a point, safdie completely nullifies the observational detachment the film takes otherwise, an unfortunate mismatch which leaves me feeling cold after each scene. playing the entirety of springsteen’s “jungleland” underneath one of the arguments doesn’t help its case, either.
these scenes also don’t work for the film’s overall musings on kerr’s addiction struggles. for one thing, as my friend amelia put it to me, why are downers making him go so berzerk that he’s destroying doors? if this is meant to solely be his inherent masculine rage coming to the fore, it doesn’t communicate that as well as those fights in the ring do (i will say too: kinda boring fights… safdie has talked about how he wanted to solely cut between coverage outside the ring, like a real fight, but there’s no excitement to that, even when compared to an actual telecast where you can feel the brutal force of the fighters… the way he cuts here completely ruins that for me). even his rehabilitation struggles don’t feel like they’re given enough time elsewhere in the film. we speed through to his sober years, even getting an homage to a classic sports movie training montage set in this time of kerr’s life, but only really see their effect on him and dawn’s relationship, and how much she failed to understand what he was dealing with, apparently (stuff like her and her best friend complaining about how annoying he is being sober - and granted his emotional abuse does worsen, but the film seems to want to make her the villain here - or the way she verbally abuses his sponsor during one of the biggest arguments). a pretty one-note characterization of her imo.
the film ends with a flash-forward to the real life kerr, having quit UFC after his last fight, finally domesticated and living a chill life in the suburbs. it’s very sweet, but it does beg the question: did he truly approve of the way this depicts his relationship with dawn? perhaps there is more truth to what this film depicts than it seemed to me. who knows. it doesn’t change what feels real and what feels fake; i think as a progression of the safdie house style, it’s a valiant experiment in simulating a real POV within a fictional context, but not all experiments work, unfortunately. there’s even precedence for this approach: safdie and nolan cite herzog and loach as influences, for example. clint’s done it, i’m sure there’s more. but by trying to balance his love for the great fighting movies with a fealty to the original documentary and the period of time it captures, benny loses sight of character entirely for me. i do appreciate, though, that this film made me think and write on its approach as much as it did. it seems we’ll have to wait and see what josh tries from his end, but i can say i am still on board with the brothers’ films, even if i can accept they’re not always going to work.
a few spare notes i couldn’t fit in above:
i quite liked the 16mm photography of the film, to be honest. although even when benny describes why he went with it, i’m not really sure? he says it’s just cause many documentaries of the past use the format… an excuse for analog fetishism, in my opinion (hyams’ film is literally shot digitally lol). but it does have good results, as i really like the textures he and bishop capture, the way the muted color palette of these spaces, both the expensive arenas and the more suburban American spots like the doctor’s office, are surveyed under intense grain, and especially the way light exposure comes off; there’s a shot during the training montage that genuinely made me think of the a-g short isolation by abbott meader, and that doesn’t count for nothing. the imax release strategy is strange especially for a film shot mostly on 16mm (with inserts from 70mm and early DV/VHS camera footage, but still), but i found the blowup actually looked quite good to my eyes. the scale doesn’t do much to help the film feel any more immersive or anything, but i was still surprised at how much detail is retained in the image, and it sounded great as a bonus.
speaking of sound, jazz wunderkind nala sinephro’s score for the film is certainly a highlight as well. for her first time scoring she manages to nail a lot of the emotional undercurrents of the film which benny and the performers can’t seem to. her music lowkey carries the fights for me lol. of note is her incredible cameo performing the american national anthem, a subversion of a common occurrence in sports films through her presence alone, considering she would have been about 4 years old during the time this film was made (again, another one of those safdie experiments, however small) but made even more fascinating by her take on the anthem, her swirling, complex compositions carried by her gorgeous harp playing making it a much more compelling song than usual.
here’s to hoping the rock sticks to doing weird projects like this, successful or not. he probably won’t be doing anything like southland tales or pain & gain again unfortunately, but i’m hoping his bid for serious acting leads him down strange pathways like this rather than expected, boring oscarbait-type stuff. if that scorsese movie actually happens it will somehow straddle all these categories and that certainly fascinates me too… watch him abandon everything and make red one 2 just cause i said this lol
gonna point out the israel flag floating above the arena in an early fight, which the camera chooses to prominently feature in a shot. you decide what it means, i don’t feel qualified to make value judgments about something so small, especially compared to josh deciding to make a movie with mr. wonderful and fran drescher.