By Last Caress.

“OH! OH! She don’t like that… OH! There you go… nice! Nice! Come on! OH! There you go! OHHH! There we go! She ain’t got no defence, let’s go… Ah, yeah! I told you that! Go to her, you’ll kill her! Go to her! Go to her! There you go! c’mon… there we go! Let the right hand go! C’mon… Ooohhh yeah! She ain’t seen nothing like you! She ain’t NEVER seen nothing like you! Look at that… get the belts, ‘Ress! We finish strong, ‘Ress! Ahh yeah, nice! T-REX! AH!”

T-Rex, the new documentary about boxer Claressa “T-Rex” Shields, opens on a press conference just after one of Claressa’s matches prior to London 2012, at which Claressa became the first ever Olympic gold medal winner in Women’s boxing (Middleweight). She’s unhappy. Did she lose? No. She didn’t like the score. “23?” She wonders. “I never got 23 in my life.”

“What are your usual scores?” Asks one journalist.

“30, 31,” sulks Claressa. I’m briefly reminded of “37?!” from Kevin Smith’s Clerks (1994), and silently berate myself for the inappropriateness. Still, here it is. And here too in many ways is T-Rex in microcosm: Claressa Shields, the remarkable athlete with dreams of Olympic history and the tools to make that happen versus Claressa Shields, the driven but often sullen teenage girl struggling with issues of anger, abandonment and life up to that point in the deeply troubled city of Flint, Michigan (from whence also sprang filmmaker Michael Moore of course).

We take up Claressa’s story as she’s seventeen and headed toward the Olympic Games held in London, UK in 2012, the first Olympic Games in which women’s boxing is a participating event. Her trainer Jason Crutchfield- the ullulator of the opening paragraph of this review – takes us further however, back to when he began working with Claressa when she was eleven years old. “She was catching on real quick. Real quick. I said, ‘Woah! You need to come with me! You need to come with me!’ And I just took her under my wing from there, you know.” Still, he confesses up front that he didn’t for a moment think she’d get anywhere with her ability, such as it was at the time. Not because of her lack of it, you understand; but because of his lack of belief in women’s boxing as a serious pursuit. Claressa Shields’ ability, confidence in herself and bull-headed determination to become more than her destiny dictated (“Girls get easily pregnant in Flint. My goal before boxing was to have ten kids before I was 26. Without boxing, I’m not goin’ to say where I’d be at.”) was such that she altered Jason’s perceptions as to just what she could go on to be. We hear from members of Claressa’s family but it’s this relationship which is at the heart of T-Rex. Its highs, and its lows.

As we move through the movie we hear more about the dreams of Claressa and of her family, mostly driven by Claressa’s need to try to pull herself and those closest to her out of and away from the relative Hell of Flint, a city with a per capita violent crime rate seven times higher than the U.S. national average. Claressa’s mother is an alcoholic, sweet when she’s sober but prone to violence when she’s not. Her father, in and out of prison, was rarely there. Eventually and at the insistence of Jason’s wife, Claressa moves in with them. Jason becomes the de facto parent as well as Claressa’s trainer, poring over her school grades, berating her for tardiness and absence, encouraging her where she’s earned it. How well though can he juggle being her “father” and her coach?

Directors Zackary Canepari and Drea Cooper keep themselves out of the picture – not something done by every documentarian of course – and in doing so paint an incredibly intimate picture of Claressa’s hard road to victory in London, taking in more drama along the way than most soap operas manage over a similar timespan. But they take us beyond that golden moment too: we also look at how Claressa is alarmingly unable to parlay Olympic success – Olympic history, no less – into a life which can secure her family. Is there still a stigma towards women? No? Towards black women? No? Towards black women boxers? Depressingly, it would appear so. But if T-Rex shows us nothing else, it shows us that Claressa Shields has the fortitude to effect changes to those perceptions as she marches towards a potential second gold medal in Brazil later this year. If you like your documentaries, T-Rex comes highly recommended.

T-Rex is available on Video on Demand now.

t-rexthefilm.com

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