Smashing Machine with Dwayne Johnson: The film’s surprising ending explained by its director

Warning – The article below contains some spoilers for “Smashing Machine” as it returns to its final sequence. So please go ahead if you haven’t seen a Benny Safdie movie yet.

How can we be surprised at the end of the biography, considering that the film in question is inspired by a real story and it is not difficult to document the fate of the person whose life we ​​are telling? If you’re wondering when you’ve seen this title, it’s because you haven’t seen Benny Safdie’s Smashing Machine, which traces the trajectory of Mark Carrey, a mixed martial arts pioneer in the late 90s.

Indeed, the fighter is played by Dwayne Johnson, who is almost unrecognizable behind the prosthetics that required nearly four hours a day, except for the final sequence of the feature film, which goes back in time and where Mark Kerr plays… himself.

Which isn’t really a subtle picture, as the scene goes on for a good few minutes and the card informs us that he married Dawn (played by Emily Blunt in Smashing Machine) shortly after this losing battle with Kazuyuki Fujita (Yoko Hamamura), which closes the story to this epilogue, and that he retired more normally in 2009. “This is Mark Carrey.” Whether or not we can read it all the way through before the final runs begin will leave us with some questions about this choice of staging and the likely changes in the transition from fiction to reality.

“The whole movie takes place in his head”

“The whole movie plays with fantasy and reality”Answers director and screenwriter Benny Safdie when we ask him about it. “Every time. At the beginning, Dwayne plays a video from YouTube and it’s like you’re seeing this fight that happened in Brazil, live on tape. The scene was created as if it was real, I’m in reality, and the ending is a passage that I wrote (laughs).

“He’s at the supermarket and he’s shopping, but it’s all written: I asked him to talk to this woman, push the cart, and then pretend that he saw the cameras. He sees that we’re still following him and laughs when he realizes that people are still interested in his life before he says goodbye to us and puts the cart away. In his mind, the whole movie plays out in his head while he’s shopping, because the music he hears causes this flashbacks and we find him at the end, in a single shot of him dreaming.

From there to imagining that in the movie world Mark Carrey imagines Dwayne Johnson playing him in a biopic is just one step that Benny Safdie takes us easily: “Of course! And it’s a way for him to know that it’s all his life, that he’s lived it.” If all goes well, this answer from the Venice-winning filmmaker will not only enlighten you: it should also make you think about Smashing Machine in a different light.