Boxing day

Clement Virgo's film, Poor Boy's Game, premieres at this year's Toronto International Film Festival. (Steve Carty/CBC)

Joyce Carol Oates wrote that boxing is “the drama of life in the flesh.” In director Clement Virgo’s Poor Boy’s Game, the drama of life is the flesh — or the skin on top of it — as the boxing ring becomes the theatre for a revenge tale about race relations. The film has its Canadian premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept.11.

“We don’t really talk about race in Canada,” says Virgo, drinking a smoothie in a coffee shop near his home in Toronto’s downtown Kensington Market neighbourhood. “We didn’t have a civil rights movement here in the same way the States did. Once in a while, the aboriginals block a train track and we’re forced to talk about aboriginal issues. But we don’t really talk about it, and this movie is about what happens when we don’t.”

At the centre of Poor Boy’s Game is Dannie Rose (played by Rossif Sutherland, Donald Sutherland’s less famous son), a white thug recently released from prison into a Halifax thick with racial tension. Rose served time for a violent beating that left a black teenager severely disabled. A local star boxer (Flex Alexander) who is black challenges Rose to a fight, setting off a chain of tragic events, and bringing the white boxer in uneasy alignment with the disabled boy’s father, a gentle former trainer played by Danny Glover.

A community unravelling in the face of a hate crime sounds like a modern, torn-from-the-headlines story, but the structure of Poor Boy’s Game is something decidedly old-fashioned. It nestles comfortably on the continuum of boxing movies, and nods appreciatively at Raging Bull, Rocky and even On the Waterfront. Not only does Glover’s character work the docks, but in one scene, Donnie and his brother (Greg Bryk) have a climactic confrontation in the back of a car, an echo of Marlon Brando’s famous “I coulda been a contender” speech.

“With that scene, I thought: ‘Either I do this, or I run like hell,’” laughs Virgo. “I admire Elia Kazan and those post-war films from the mid-’50s where they’re stripped down, really experimenting with actors, making things as real as possible.”

For those familiar with Virgo’s oeuvre, the statement might come as a surprise. At 27, Virgo sprang onto the Canadian film scene in 1995 with the film Rude, a symbol-laced, multi-layered story about one night in a Toronto social housing project. His last film, 2005’s Lie With Me, was an impressionistic, graphic love story based on a book by his wife, Tamara Faith Berger (at the 2005 Toronto Film Festival, the film generated a lot of ink for daring to show an erect penis). For better or worse, Virgo, now 39, has been tagged “arty,” but he seems eager to shake it off.

Ossie Paris (Flex Alexander), left, and Donnie Rose (Rossif Sutherland) battle it out in Poor Boy's Game. (Seville Pictures)

“Rude was very much about me. I was the star. I could show off with these fancy camera moves, disjointed time, three stories,” says Virgo. “Now with Poor Boy’s Game, I can let the story be the star. In a way, in my career, I’m circling back, seeing if I can tell a narrative with a three-act structure.”

He has found that following convention is a new kind of challenge.

“It’s very easy to be abstract. It’s much harder to paint an image that’s unique but that you’ve seen before. It’s much easier to break the rules before you know the rules.” 

Virgo first encountered Poor Boy’s Game during a Pitch This! Competition at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2001, a seminar where writers present their story ideas to industry professionals. A screenwriter named Chaz Thorne was trying to sell a semi-autobiographical account of a personal tragedy: In 1995, his white cousin was shot to death by a black man in Thorne’s hometown of Halifax.  

“It was a very different script then and I didn’t want to do a white guilt movie. But I liked the idea, and the boxing,” says Virgo, who incorporated his appreciation for the sport into Rude, too. “Boxing speaks to me on a spiritual level. To see someone go beyond themselves, operating on their core — I love that.”  

Thorne and Virgo worked together on the script for three years, and when it was done, Virgo handed it to Danny Glover. The co-star of the Lethal Weapon franchise had been trying to get the director involved with a project of his own. Two weeks later, Glover called and signed on. 

“I learned fast that he’s an actor and he wants to be directed. But at first, I was a little intimidated. He’s a larger-than-life figure,” Virgo admits. In contrast, Sutherland has an ethereal, androgynous quality. 

“A lot of guys came in [to audition for Donnie], and they were all squinty and grumbling. I wasn’t interested in a tough guy,” Virgo says. “I was interested in a guy who’s vulnerable, who has some mystery in him, and something feminine. I wanted a Montgomery Clift kind of guy.”

Virgo came to Toronto from Jamaica at age 11. When he shot the Emmy-nominated TV movie The Planet of Junior Brown in Halifax in 1997, he perceived a more entrenched, overt racial split than in Toronto. 

“Halifax is very similar to an American city. It has the oldest black population, and there’s a history of divide between the communities.  I just felt like certain spaces didn’t belong to me. It’s a feeling, a vibe in clubs or in restaurants. Just: ‘You don’t really belong in this space,’” he says evenly.

The subtle ways racism plays out — that quiet unease — is as ugly in Poor Boy’s Game as any pounding in the ring. In one scene, a group of black men keep getting turned away from a white nightclub. 

“That happens in Toronto, too, definitely,” says Virgo. “No one will say: ‘You can’t come in because you’re black.’ But they’ll say: ‘You have the wrong shirt on.’ When you go get the right shirt, they change the rule to something else. That’s a metaphor.” 

And yet, Poor Boy’s Game is sprung through with optimism. For all their brutality, boxing films are, in the end, always about redemption.  

“I went with big emotions in this movie, and I know I risk being labelled sentimental,” says Virgo. “But I have to be optimistic. I don’t want to do irony. My wife’s Jewish, I’m black and my [21- month-old] son is going to be a black man in what’s still a white country. I want him to think of the possibilities for the future, that there’s nothing he cannot imagine for himself.” Virgo pauses. “So there’s some urgency to this film.” 

Poor Boy’s Game screens at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 11 and 13. It also will screen at the Atlantic Film Festival on Sept. 15 and 16.

Katrina Onstad writes for CBCnews.ca Arts. 

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