Fat City

An aging boxer (Stacy Keach) meets a young boxer (Jeff Bridges) and a barfly (Susan Tyrrell).

Fat City is a gritty, unglamorous look at the life of an amateur boxer past his prime with no future ahead of him. All the performances are amazing, so much so that Fat City doesn’t even feel like a movie, but rather a window into the lives of these people.

Director John Huston was sixty-five years old when he made Fat City and he’d been directing movies almost non-stop for thirty years. Like Stacy Keach’s character in the film, you can feel Huston reaching for one last shot at something special but, like Keach, he falls short.

While Fat City has realism and characterization in spades, it doesn’t really have any story. This movie could have worked as the pilot episode for a series, or the second act of a three and a half hour epic, but on its own, it’s just not enough. It’s a slice of life movie that’s just not filling.