Our Critic Goes to the Mat
Wall Street Journal
By Barbara D. Phillips
No one could call me a pro wrestling fan. Sure, I've known for months that this soap opera buffa filled with beefy stuntmen garners some of cable TV's highest ratings, particularly among guys 18 to 34. But until a few weeks ago I couldn't tell Ted Turner's World Championship Wrestling from Vince McMahon's World Wrestling Federation.
Still, I was pinned to the living-room couch for the entire length of "Hitman Hart, Wrestling With Shadows," Canadian filmmaker Paul Jay's behind-the-scenes documentary that has its U.S. debut on A&E Sunday (9-11 p.m. EST). Mr. Jay and his crew kept the cameras rolling for a year as the real life of Bret "Hitman" Hart came to resemble one of wrestling's fictional morality tales.
Hart, now in his early 40s, grew up one of eight boys and four girls in Calgary, Alberta, the son of Stu Hart, a wrestler and promoter now retired and in his 80s. On-screen, Bret's siblings talk about the family "dungeon," a basement gym to which Stu would lure young men eager to prove their stuff. His sister Diana recalls that "my brother Bruce sent Owen in once to tape record this one guy. He was actually really pathetic. He was crying and weeping through the whole thing. There was some country-western song in the background and this guy's screaming, and my dad saying, 'Have some discipline.'"
Bret says he was "deathly afraid" of his father back then. "He could get you to the top of the mountain, which is his word for screaming for your life....I used to often sort of envision the newspaper headlines sort of spinning around going, 'Professional Wrestler goes Too Far.'" Bret's own wrestling philosophy is different from Stu's. "I've been wrestling for 20 years, and I've never hurt anybody," he tells the filmmakers. "I mean, it's been full contact and very physical, but when you come back to the dressing room after, you should be able to put your boots on and go home....You know, there's an art to wrestling. But people never come up and say you're a hell of an actor. They always come up and just go, "You're a phony.'"
Despite Bret's early determination to stay out of the family business (he was a film major in college), he soon found himself working for Stu and, a few years later, for Vince McMahon, who bought out Bret's father while building his wrestling empire. In fact, all the Hart boys became wrestlers and all the girls married them, much to the chagrin of their mother, Helen. Bret's wife Julie is only a little less enamoured of his career choice, which keeps him away from her and their four children far too often. Bret has been playing the hero at the WWF for 14 years, when, in 1996, the WCW makes him an offer he is hard-pressed to refuse. "They've offered me $9 million over three years. Which is – you know, when I got into wrestling, beyond anything I ever imagined. Vince McMahon came to me and he offered me – you know, for a lot less money – but he offered me a 20-year contract....I feel like the prettiest girl at the dance."
After a lot of soul-searching, Hart re-ups with McMahon and the WWF. "You know," he says, "I think my relationship with, with Vince McMahon was always sort of like a father....If I left, it would have been a little like leaving my dad. And especially when the chips were down....Loyalty is important." Looking back a little later, Hart says there was an even bigger factor. "What would happen to the Hitman character? What would the WCW do with that character? And I had to reflect and go, 'I know one thing. In the WWF, I'll always be able to go out the hero.'"
He couldn't have been more wrong. While bad guys once got only boos, American fans have started to cheer the most evil character in the WWF empire, Stone Cold Steve Austin. "In the end, the fans decide everything," Hart says. And "McMahon is positioning him to be a fan favourite." Part of this modern-day Barnum's plan for Austin involves the Hitman turning villain. And eventually Hart agrees. "You end up trying to find the vein of reality in it," says the method wrestler. So Hart's Hitman declares war on the U.S. fans while remaining a hero in Canada: "Nobody glorifies criminal conduct like the Americans do," Hitman proclaims. "In all the countries that I go to around the world, they still respect what's right and what's wrong. You American wrestling fans, coast to coast, you don't respect me. Well, the fact is, I don't respect you." Back home he wraps himself – sometimes literally – in the Canadian flag: "For me, Canada is a country where we still take care of the sick and the old, where we still have health care, we got gun control, we don't shoot each other and kill each other on every street-corner. Canada isn't riddled with racial prejudice and hatred." And as the WWF takes a pounding in the real ratings war against Ted Turner's WCW, the WWF becomes ruder and cruder. "I can't imagine what their thinking is," Hart says. "I can't imagine Vince McMahon sitting around the table going, 'Well, why don't we try this tonight? You know, Shawn [Michaels] will pull his pants down and show the crack of his a– to everybody.'...I wish I could be in the room and go, 'What, are you guys nuts?' It's become smut TV."
In September 1997, McMahon tells Hart that he wants out of their 20-year contract, citing "financial peril." He says the wrestler will be doing him a favour if he can get his old deal with the WCW.
Luckily for hart, the Turner folks welcome him into the fold. So this true story falls far short of tragedy. (Hart, who writes every week for the Calgary Sun, said in a recent column that his year with the WCW has been happy.) But in November 1997, before Hart moved to the other side, McMahon lied to him, setting him up for a psychic blow that a stunned Hart then countered with a (real) punch to McMahon's jaw. (Perhaps giving McMahon the idea, when he came to, for his own current onscreen persona – a smarky, evil schemer regularly pummelled by his own wrestlers.) This is truly a knockout film.
