Hart of gold
A review requested by Brian, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon.
"The world of Canadian documentary filmmaking" is a phrase that sounds like I'm being sarcastic, or at least deadpan, but I swear I'm not - the world of Canadian documentary filmmaking is long-lived and important, one of the places where documentary technique was forged in the first half of the 20th Century, when it was coalescing into the form we know today. There's not just an argument, there's a very straightforward and easy argument to be made that the National Film Board of Canada is the single most important producer of documentary films in history, and has been without interruption since the early 1940s. But there's also a certain insular quality to this, in that something can be very important in the world of Canadian documentary filmmaking and not be very important in any other world. Which is what gets us to 1998's Hitman Hart: Wrestling with Shadows, which was celebrated in just about every way that a Canadian documentary can be celebrated upon its release, and also I had never, ever heard of it before being assigned a review of it. This reflects worse on me than it does on the film itself, which earns an awful lot of that celebration; I don't know that it's terribly exciting or innovative strictly from a formal perspective, but it gets to compensate for that by being one of the luckiest non-fiction shoots I've ever heard of: while writer-director Paul Jay was filming his project, which obviously started out as a simple puff piece about beloved Canadian wrestler Bret "The Hitman" Hart with no greater aspirations than "national treasure makes good", he and his production crew inadvertently ended up pointing their cameras at one of the most transformative years and one of the most significant events in the history of professional wrestling. To a certain extent, Jay literally needed to do nothing at all but stand out of the way of reality while it crafted for him one of the most substantial character arcs I have ever heard of in any sports documentary. That covers up for quite a lot of pedestrian filmmaking.
The backstory, some of which is explained in the film and some of which is merely hinted at: born in Alberta in 1957, Hart was the most famous scion of a wrestling family, who began professionally wrestling himself in his early 20s. Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, he exploded in international popularity, becoming one of the faces of the sport. For much of that time, including his dominance in the '90s, he was a headliner in the World Wrestling Federation, treasuring his persona as a morally straightforward hero figure and his ability to stand for Canada on the world stage. He also considered himself indebted to WWF owner and impresario Vince McMahon, and his personal loyalty to that man is presented by Hitman Hart: Wrestling with Shadows as his great tragic flaw. And this gets us to early 1997, when the movie begins around the time is offered an extremely generous offer to leave the WWF and sign up with World Championship Wrestling, part of the Ted Turner media empire and by far the closest thing WWF had to a genuine threat to its dominance as the main force in professional wrestling in the anglosphere (indeed, with hindsight our side, we can point to 1997 as being maybe the specific year when WCW was in the best position to replace WWF as the main face of wrestling in the United States). Hart turns down the offer, citing his loyalty to McMahon and the WWF, and this would seem to be the end of it, except that what followed was a series of reasonable business decisions and petty personal vendettas. The film can't come out and say it, because the footage of course isn't there, but it seems awfully likely that McMahon was so offended that Hart would even contemplate leaving that turned his attention punishing the star, in part by encouraging him to embrace the anti-hero vibe that was growing increasing popular with wrestling fans in the late '90s, a persona that Hart was very uncomfortable with. By November, the relationship between the men had deteriorated to the point that Hart ended up taking the offer from WCW, and McMahon engineered a public shaming to ruin Hart's departure from WWF that is, I am informed by people who know more about this than I do, one of the most notorious things to have happened in the history of professional wrestling.
One of the longstanding truths about sports movies is that the very best examples of the genre are almost all either wrestling pictures or boxing pictures, and my theory is that the reason for this this is that those are the two main sports that can be most readily structured as a dramatic narrative about one protagonist and one antagonist, or a protagonist versus the whole rotten world. Hitman Hart, nonfiction though it is, and with a story provided by reality rather than a screenwriter with a working knowledge of '30s and '40s melodramas, fits squarely into this mode. Hart is, from all the evidence that shows up onscreen (and, to be fair, all of the evidence from the rest of his career and retirement), just a really nice fella, thoughtful and reflective about his profession, committed to both the art and entertainment of wrestling, and seriously, sincerely devoted to his role as cultural ambassador of Canada to the world. McMahon is, from all the available evidence, the literal Antichrist, and I will say that the one thing that has aged somewhat poorly about Hitman Hart is how it brings us to that knowledge. In 2024, encountering McMahon onscreen, even as a non-fan of wrestling, cannot help but start with the reaction, "oh, that guy. Isn't that the guy who has basically no redeeming characteristics whatsoever and uses his wrestling empire as a front for sex trafficking?" In 1998, enough of that was still in the land of rumor and innuendo that the movie is somewhat structured around this coming as a devastating shock to us. What makes this still mostly work, and why I say it has aged "somewhat" poorly, is that it still comes as a devastating shock to Hart - not that McMahon is outed as a sex trafficker, those accusations didn't come until years later, but the discovery that Good Friend Vince is a malicious lizard man ready to pounce on whatever shred of human vulnerabiity he can find and turn it as a cruel weapon against its owner, that is very much Hart's journey across Hitman Hart. One of the most piercing moments early in the film, to me, finds Jay keeping the camera trained on McMahon's face during Hart's public announcement that he's declining the WCW contract, and McMahon goes from a studiously neutral expression of pent-up anxiety to a gulp of surprised relief. Hell, maybe McMahon actually was surprised and relieved, that's not really what's striking about it. It's that the film is carefully making us see McMahon as a man who is nervous to lose his friend and colleague and has a profound human response to learning that he won't; we're seeing the McMahon that Hart sees, basically, and later on, when McMahon starts to peel away his layers of kindness and humanity, it's hard not to want to go back to that moment. Was he faking it? Is that just how much of a cold-blooded sociopath he really is? It's devastating to watch this play out through the film's eyes and through Hart's gradually building feelings of betrayal across the course of 1997.
For that really is the story of Hitman Hart, well before it reaches the end of its 93-minute running time and Jay has the once-in-a-career good fortune to already be recording the event later known as the Montreal Screwjob basically just because he thought it was going to provide a very different climax to a very different documentary. It is a story of Bret Hart learning that the wrestling business isn't nice, and he, being a nice person, will suffer for being a part of it. Even more than the Montreal Screwjob or the flickers of reptilian satisfaction we see on McMahon's face, the really tragic thing to me comes when Hart is trying on the role of antihero, and performs some business as a Canadian hyper-nationalist. Jay contrasts this with Canadian fans who view the very idea of "Canadian nationalism" as a kind of silly oxymoron, but we don't need the film to bluntly tell us that it's ridiculous: we can see fairly readily that Hart isn't comfortable with this, and while he's too much of a professional not to commit to the bit, his eyes aren't selling it the way we can read sincerity in them for virtually every other moment of the film.
It's a strong enough character study that I'd be inclinded to trot out some tired cliché along the lines of "a wrestling movie for people who don't know the first thing about wrestling", or whatnot. I mean, I don't know the first thing about wrestling, and I found this a very sweet and sad experience, instantly liking Bret Hart and then finding his attempts to make sense of the changing face of professional wrestling into something he's just not suited for, despite having spent his whole life tailoring himself to this world. He's a great subject, and having a great subject is a huge part of the battle in making a worthwhile documentary. Practically nothing about Hitman Hart: Wrestling with Shadows is particularly sophisticated as cinema: it even has to rely on something as crude as onscreen text summarising what happened since the previous scene, the last resort of the filmmaker who just didn't have the footage he needed and needs to puke out some artless exposition as fast as possible in order to keep things moving forward. But it's still a pretty good time, and as someone who knew absolutely nothing about Bret Hart before now, I'm very glad to have gotten to meet him.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
"The world of Canadian documentary filmmaking" is a phrase that sounds like I'm being sarcastic, or at least deadpan, but I swear I'm not - the world of Canadian documentary filmmaking is long-lived and important, one of the places where documentary technique was forged in the first half of the 20th Century, when it was coalescing into the form we know today. There's not just an argument, there's a very straightforward and easy argument to be made that the National Film Board of Canada is the single most important producer of documentary films in history, and has been without interruption since the early 1940s. But there's also a certain insular quality to this, in that something can be very important in the world of Canadian documentary filmmaking and not be very important in any other world. Which is what gets us to 1998's Hitman Hart: Wrestling with Shadows, which was celebrated in just about every way that a Canadian documentary can be celebrated upon its release, and also I had never, ever heard of it before being assigned a review of it. This reflects worse on me than it does on the film itself, which earns an awful lot of that celebration; I don't know that it's terribly exciting or innovative strictly from a formal perspective, but it gets to compensate for that by being one of the luckiest non-fiction shoots I've ever heard of: while writer-director Paul Jay was filming his project, which obviously started out as a simple puff piece about beloved Canadian wrestler Bret "The Hitman" Hart with no greater aspirations than "national treasure makes good", he and his production crew inadvertently ended up pointing their cameras at one of the most transformative years and one of the most significant events in the history of professional wrestling. To a certain extent, Jay literally needed to do nothing at all but stand out of the way of reality while it crafted for him one of the most substantial character arcs I have ever heard of in any sports documentary. That covers up for quite a lot of pedestrian filmmaking.
The backstory, some of which is explained in the film and some of which is merely hinted at: born in Alberta in 1957, Hart was the most famous scion of a wrestling family, who began professionally wrestling himself in his early 20s. Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, he exploded in international popularity, becoming one of the faces of the sport. For much of that time, including his dominance in the '90s, he was a headliner in the World Wrestling Federation, treasuring his persona as a morally straightforward hero figure and his ability to stand for Canada on the world stage. He also considered himself indebted to WWF owner and impresario Vince McMahon, and his personal loyalty to that man is presented by Hitman Hart: Wrestling with Shadows as his great tragic flaw. And this gets us to early 1997, when the movie begins around the time is offered an extremely generous offer to leave the WWF and sign up with World Championship Wrestling, part of the Ted Turner media empire and by far the closest thing WWF had to a genuine threat to its dominance as the main force in professional wrestling in the anglosphere (indeed, with hindsight our side, we can point to 1997 as being maybe the specific year when WCW was in the best position to replace WWF as the main face of wrestling in the United States). Hart turns down the offer, citing his loyalty to McMahon and the WWF, and this would seem to be the end of it, except that what followed was a series of reasonable business decisions and petty personal vendettas. The film can't come out and say it, because the footage of course isn't there, but it seems awfully likely that McMahon was so offended that Hart would even contemplate leaving that turned his attention punishing the star, in part by encouraging him to embrace the anti-hero vibe that was growing increasing popular with wrestling fans in the late '90s, a persona that Hart was very uncomfortable with. By November, the relationship between the men had deteriorated to the point that Hart ended up taking the offer from WCW, and McMahon engineered a public shaming to ruin Hart's departure from WWF that is, I am informed by people who know more about this than I do, one of the most notorious things to have happened in the history of professional wrestling.
One of the longstanding truths about sports movies is that the very best examples of the genre are almost all either wrestling pictures or boxing pictures, and my theory is that the reason for this this is that those are the two main sports that can be most readily structured as a dramatic narrative about one protagonist and one antagonist, or a protagonist versus the whole rotten world. Hitman Hart, nonfiction though it is, and with a story provided by reality rather than a screenwriter with a working knowledge of '30s and '40s melodramas, fits squarely into this mode. Hart is, from all the evidence that shows up onscreen (and, to be fair, all of the evidence from the rest of his career and retirement), just a really nice fella, thoughtful and reflective about his profession, committed to both the art and entertainment of wrestling, and seriously, sincerely devoted to his role as cultural ambassador of Canada to the world. McMahon is, from all the available evidence, the literal Antichrist, and I will say that the one thing that has aged somewhat poorly about Hitman Hart is how it brings us to that knowledge. In 2024, encountering McMahon onscreen, even as a non-fan of wrestling, cannot help but start with the reaction, "oh, that guy. Isn't that the guy who has basically no redeeming characteristics whatsoever and uses his wrestling empire as a front for sex trafficking?" In 1998, enough of that was still in the land of rumor and innuendo that the movie is somewhat structured around this coming as a devastating shock to us. What makes this still mostly work, and why I say it has aged "somewhat" poorly, is that it still comes as a devastating shock to Hart - not that McMahon is outed as a sex trafficker, those accusations didn't come until years later, but the discovery that Good Friend Vince is a malicious lizard man ready to pounce on whatever shred of human vulnerabiity he can find and turn it as a cruel weapon against its owner, that is very much Hart's journey across Hitman Hart. One of the most piercing moments early in the film, to me, finds Jay keeping the camera trained on McMahon's face during Hart's public announcement that he's declining the WCW contract, and McMahon goes from a studiously neutral expression of pent-up anxiety to a gulp of surprised relief. Hell, maybe McMahon actually was surprised and relieved, that's not really what's striking about it. It's that the film is carefully making us see McMahon as a man who is nervous to lose his friend and colleague and has a profound human response to learning that he won't; we're seeing the McMahon that Hart sees, basically, and later on, when McMahon starts to peel away his layers of kindness and humanity, it's hard not to want to go back to that moment. Was he faking it? Is that just how much of a cold-blooded sociopath he really is? It's devastating to watch this play out through the film's eyes and through Hart's gradually building feelings of betrayal across the course of 1997.
For that really is the story of Hitman Hart, well before it reaches the end of its 93-minute running time and Jay has the once-in-a-career good fortune to already be recording the event later known as the Montreal Screwjob basically just because he thought it was going to provide a very different climax to a very different documentary. It is a story of Bret Hart learning that the wrestling business isn't nice, and he, being a nice person, will suffer for being a part of it. Even more than the Montreal Screwjob or the flickers of reptilian satisfaction we see on McMahon's face, the really tragic thing to me comes when Hart is trying on the role of antihero, and performs some business as a Canadian hyper-nationalist. Jay contrasts this with Canadian fans who view the very idea of "Canadian nationalism" as a kind of silly oxymoron, but we don't need the film to bluntly tell us that it's ridiculous: we can see fairly readily that Hart isn't comfortable with this, and while he's too much of a professional not to commit to the bit, his eyes aren't selling it the way we can read sincerity in them for virtually every other moment of the film.
It's a strong enough character study that I'd be inclinded to trot out some tired cliché along the lines of "a wrestling movie for people who don't know the first thing about wrestling", or whatnot. I mean, I don't know the first thing about wrestling, and I found this a very sweet and sad experience, instantly liking Bret Hart and then finding his attempts to make sense of the changing face of professional wrestling into something he's just not suited for, despite having spent his whole life tailoring himself to this world. He's a great subject, and having a great subject is a huge part of the battle in making a worthwhile documentary. Practically nothing about Hitman Hart: Wrestling with Shadows is particularly sophisticated as cinema: it even has to rely on something as crude as onscreen text summarising what happened since the previous scene, the last resort of the filmmaker who just didn't have the footage he needed and needs to puke out some artless exposition as fast as possible in order to keep things moving forward. But it's still a pretty good time, and as someone who knew absolutely nothing about Bret Hart before now, I'm very glad to have gotten to meet him.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
Categories: canadian cinema, documentaries, sports films
