photo by Karina Longworth

France loves James Toback, and James Toback loves France right back. The New York auteur, whose work is more often than not unfairly maligned stateside, has already seen Fingers, his first (and best) film, remade by French director Jacques Audiard. The original is one of two Toback films screening at Cannes this year; the other, his documentary on long-time friend Mike Tyson, premiered to more than one standing ovation last night.

If France loves James Toback, Cannes, apparently, wants to take Mike Tyson behind the middle school and get him pregnant. Applause for Toback at last night’s screening was sufficient and polite (and, after the screening, it drove the filmmaker off the stage in tears); reaction to Tyson’s entrance verged on hysterical. So it’s fitting that Toback’s Tyson is a film that requires its audience to learn to love its subject, and even feeds on that love. I’m conflicted about the film’s ultimate value, but maybe Cannes got the Mike Tyson documentary it deserves.

People seem to be split on this film. Those who, ordinarily, can’t stand James Toback, are keen to praise the director’s lack of presence in the film. But those of us who don’t hate Toback, who are maybe even kind of into him, or at least derive some pleasure from watching his output swing wildly between guilty pleasures (The Pick Up Artist, When Will I be Loved) to fascinating car crashes (Two Girls and a Guy, Black and White) to near masterpieces (Fingers) –– we seem to be troubled by the way Toback’s voice is both absent from Tyson and all over it.

The film essentially plays like a conversation between Tyson and Toback, with all of Toback’s lines edited out. You thus feel the filmmaker’s influence on Tyson’s narration/analysis of his own life, but in an almost ghostly way. To see a filmmaker with such an identifiable voice subsume that voice in his subject is somewhat disconcerting. Tyson is nothing if not self-critical, but the film lacks dynamism. Watching it, I longer for more Toback––there’s something missing here, the conversation feels incomplete.

Which is not to say that Tyson is unidentifiable as a James Toback production. As a filmmaker, Toback has an extraordinary talent for making an audience hate itself. He forces us to feel things we don’t want to feel, and then forces us to face our reluctance head on. Let’s call this, with apologies to Lubitsch, The Toback Touch. With Tyson, he puts that talent to service in the most literal manner in memory. Tyson doesn’t simply ask us to sympathize with the professional monster/convicted rapist––turned––repentant twelve-stepper at its core; the film ultimately forces us to see Tyson as pathetic. In films final moments, you get the sense that Tyson is in such a state that he actually needs some mix of adoration and pity as a tonic to help him survive.

Or, at least, that’s what Toback wants us to think. If he suckers us into a rather unpleasant emotional state while we’re watching the film, it seems to be part of an overall strategy that’s possibly more nefarious. Toback and Tyson both seem to want us to translate that emotional investment into investment in the new Tyson brand. Tyson blatantly admits in the film that he took on his final fight, which he lost miserably to Kevin McBride, purely to cash in. It’s hard not to see Tyson as an elaborate effort on the part of Toback and Tyson to rehab the latter’s image to the point where the checks roll in automatically.

I can’t understand how anyone could walk out of Tyson and praise it without conflict or condition. For me, the most valuable thing about it is that it could very well serve as the vehicle to inject The Toback Touch into the mainstream, for the first time in years (decades? How long ago was Bugsy?). It’s possible that I’m just a Toback apologist, but I find that prospect really exciting.