‘The Featherweight’ Review: Lovingly Textured Faux-Documentary Charts a Champion’s Slide Into the Shadows

variety.com:

Guy Lodge Film Critic An Emmy-nominated documentary cinematographer with credits including “Procession” and “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” Robert Kolodny puts his expert eye for shooting nonfiction to playful narrative use in his feature directing debut “The Featherweight.” A meticulously designed, gutsily played biopic of world champion featherweight boxer Guglielmo Papaleo, better known as Willie Pep — covering not his 1940s glory days but his faltering attempt at a comeback two decades later — the film is convincingly fashioned as a candid all-access documentary, a promotional puff piece curdling before our eyes into an unintended study of mental breakdown.

So convincingly, in fact, that uninformed viewers chancing upon “The Featherweight” on the festival circuit may wonder exactly what it is they’re watching, not least if — in a realization of Pep’s own glumly stated fears — they have no idea who this once-celebrated sportsman was.

Kolodny puts nary a foot wrong in his precise replication of a midcentury vérité aesthetic and gaze, from the particular grain and thrust of the camerawork to the authentically abrasive tone and tenor of the performances. (The film’s closing credits include telling hat-tips to D.A.

Pennebaker and Albert and David Maysles.) As a feat of cinematic masquerade, it could hardly be pulled off with any more panache: The term “mockumentary” hardly feels appropriate for a film this reverent of its supposed form, and this toughly loving toward its human subject.