I saw and reviewed James Toback’s Tyson at its world premiere at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, and the docu-confessional certainly left a lasting impression … for the wrong reasons. Mike Tyson himself walked down the long aisle of the Lumiere theater after the screening to both a rapturous standing ovation from the home crowd, and a dimly heard protest cry of “rapist!” drifting down from the balcony (a female film critic later took credit for the latter). Suffice it to say, that contradiction made that Cannes premiere  … uh … memorable, regardless of the content of the film.

Almost a year later, there seem to be as few contrasting voices in regards to Tyson as there are in regards to Tyson within the film itself. The way this non-conventional nonfiction film, and what a cynic might see as the nefarious project behind it, has been accepted by the media virtually unquestioningly, even appreciatively (see the 85% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, higher than the current rating for the latest film from the critically beloved Dardennes brothers), cements that Cannes premiere as a crucial moment in documentary evolution. That night in May, the freak show aesthetic that marks salacious, nonfiction-in-name (if questionably in content) VH1 product like Flava of Love, Celebrity Rehab and Confessions of a Teen Idol, slipped seamlessly into Cannes, en route to a US arthouse release from the same company that brought you very classy recent Oscar nominees Frozen River, Waltz with Bashir and The Class. That night, any remaining distinction between the lowbrow non-fiction of reality TV and the rarefied space of the world’s most revered film festival ceased to exist.

Tyson plays as an effort on the part of Toback, a friend of the film’s subject and a comrade in the fight against addiction, to relaunch the great fighter, best known in recent decades as an ear biter, as a post-Celebreality brand, one part sincere hero and two parts loveable joke.  Toback’s use of overlapping sound and picture-in-picture to convey Tyson’s schizophrenic treatment of his own history has been read as the filmmaker’s critique of his subject’s limitations, but viewed in the context of mainstream fallen-star-as-hero media, it plays as character-building punchline. Tyson himself can’t reconstruct his own life into a linear narrative? Ha! He so crazy! Ultimately, Tyson not only asks us to sympathize with its extraordinarily unsympathetic star, but it also sends the message that, after all he’s been through, Tyson deserves a second chance at our love. Not because there’s any chance that he’s going to repeat the triumphs that made us idolize him in the first place, but just because he’s asking for it. That anyone is actually buying it is an object lesson in Foucaultian obsession with confession that could blow a junior philosophy T.A.’s mind..

The subtext of David Carr’s let’s-talk-addict-to-addict moment with Tyson’s subject at Sundance was the reminder that we live in a culture that enjoys living vicariously through, judging and then forgiving the bad behavior of others. As spectators, we eagerly reward repentance with notoriety, whether you’re a disgraced athlete or media reporter for the New York Times. But am I the only one who thinks it’s one thing to spin entertainment out of the tail-between-his-legs comeback of Scott Baio (or even Flava Flav), but to give Mike Tyson the same treatment is to go a step too far? At a dinner celebrating the film in Park City, Tyson’s was widely quoted quipping that he’s “afraid of how much pussy and how much money” Toback’s film is going to bring him. So am I.

It would make more sense to offer it up as an alternate option if it were more readily available, but for those who leave Tyson in want of a more clear-eyed, intellectually engaged take on the big bad boxer, Barbara Kopple’s 1993 TV documentary Fallen Champ: The Untold Story of Mike Tyson, which Thom Powers screened a couple of weeks back at Stranger Than Fiction, is worth seeking out (if you have the means to watch VHS, used copies are available on Amazon, and possibly in your local video store).

A talking head in Kopple’s film references the “forces struggling for the soul of Mike Tyson.” If Toback’s film is, as the director has put it, a “self-portrait” that mimics psychoanalysis, then it’s one positioned on the inside looking out onto those forces.  Kopple, who offers ample evidence that Tyson’s soul would have landed him in trouble whether it was the subject of a struggle or not, has made more of a psychological biography, in which journalists, experts, Tyson’s former friends and colleagues (and those of people like Desiree Washington, his alleged rape victim) relate the history and context of Tyson’s psyche. Even as the film describes the external forces that troubled Tyson and simultaneously diagnoses his internal turmoil, it makes it clear that it’s not always a simple cause-and-effect relationship between the two. It acknowledges the pressures of the street and distortions of fame that Toback’s film vilifies, but it never pegs the external as the culprit for the totality of the internal. The Toback film seems to spin on the thesis that the more Tyson is a created monster, the better the chance that there’ll be something good leftover when you take those negative influences away, and as long as he atones for his mistakes (and Tyson itself seems to be that atonement, writ large), we can and should consider him rehabbed and ready for primetime.

Fallen Champ is more conflicted and more thoughtful, sometimes daringly so, and maybe never more so than when unlikely boxing expert/known master of the modes of sexual melodrama Joyce Carol Oates is on screen. Though Kopple is careful throughout to reveal the pattern of misbehavior towards women that was embedded into Tyson’s professional athletic identity, this theme truly hits home (no pun intended) with Oates’ analysis of some comments Tyson made for TV cameras after a particularly easy victory; the author dryly quips that the boxer likely could only be able to say that another (male) fighter responded to his punches “like a woman” if he had ample first hand information as to how women respond when hit.

More revealing is what Oates has to say in regards to how the boxer feeds off a crowd. “The whole thing is an exercise in complicity, which people don’t like to talk about,” she says. The irony is that Toback’s film is 100 percent dependent on a similar complicity — if the audience’s energy feeds a fighter to extract his own rage in the ring, Toback seems to be hoping to harness that same energy from the viewer to feed Tyson’s self-worth and to fuel his reformation. When it comes to Tyson, I wish more people were talking about that.

Portions of this piece appeared in slightly different form in the Yearbook printed for the 2009 Cinema Eye Honors.