THE BRONZE – The Review

THE BRONZE is a painfully funny portrait of a strikingly deranged and clueless young woman. Hope Annabelle Gregory (Melissa Rauch) is a celebrity in her home town of Amherst Ohio. She won the bronze in gymnastics at the Rome Olympics several years earlier, even after suffering a career-ending foot injury. Hope lives at home with her kind mailman dad Stan (Gary Cole), and avoids getting a day job at all costs. Her entitled life mostly consists of eating free meals at Sbarro while being rude to everyone she encounters. Her ex-coach dies and bequeaths Hope $500,000 contingent she gets the money only if she coaches the young hometown gymnastics phenom Maggie Townsend (Haley Lu Richardson) in her quest for Olympic fame. Also interested in Maggie’s future are the local gym manager Ben (or, as Hope calls him “Twitchy”, because of some unfortunate facial tics  -played by Thomas Middleditch) and Lance (Sebastian Stan), a Gold medal winner who thinks he’d be a better coach for Maggie. Will Hope let young Maggie get to the Olympics, stealing her small-town thunder in the process, or will she sabotage the kid’s career?

THE BRONZE is less a rah-rah spandex-strutting sports flick and more a vulgar pointed human comedy with plenty to say about desperately clinging on to your 15 minutes of fame. The film’s success rises or falls on the capable shoulders of Melissa Rauch (who, along with husband Winston Rauch, wrote the script) in the lead. Hope is introduced pleasuring herself to a tape of her Olympic performance (lying under an American flag no less). She may look innocent from a distance, but up close she is the foul-mouthed embodiment of bitterness, with a squeaky, talk-out-the-side-of-her-mouth surliness that makes Tanya Harding look like Grace Kelly. She’s a grossly immature bully cut from the same unselfconscious cloth as Charlize Theron in YOUNG ADULT or Danny McBride in THE FOOT FIST WAY but with an even nastier streak. Hope does make her way up the redemptive scale as the story progresses, but not much. Haley Lu Richardson as Maggie is a real find – she gives an energetic, funny and physical performance –  you feel exhausted just watching her as Hope introduces her to such non-competitive distractions as marijuana and overeating. Middleditch as Twitchy is likable and scores some unlikely romantic chemistry with Rauch. Sebastian Stan is appropriately douchey as the arrogant ex-champ who joins Rauch (or her body double anyway) for the jaw-dropping acrobatic sex scene that everyone will be talking about. THE BRONZE’s most human touch is Hope’s dad Stan, wonderfully played by Gary Cole. Widowed when his daughter was a baby, Stan is aware Hope is a snot, yet still makes her the spoiled center of his universe. Though she repays his kindness by belittling him mercilessly and stealing cash from the greeting cards in his mail truck, there is real depth to their relationship. With a running time of 105 minutes, THE BRONZE comes close to outstaying its welcome but Rauch milks the character and her foibles for all the laughs she’s worth – which prove to be plenty.

4 of 5 Stars

THE BRONZE opens in St. Louis March 18 at, among other places, Landmark’s The Tivoli Theater