Saw Melissa Rauch’s debut feature film, The Bronze. About six months ago, the heartbreaking story of former Olympic bronze medalist Debi Thomas hit the airwaves. In addition to a successful skating career, Thomas had graduated from Stanford with an engineering degree in 1991 and from Northwestern Medical School in 1997 and became an orthopedic surgeon. Now 48 years old, Thomas lost custody of her son and was broke, unemployed and living in horrific conditions in her trailer. Thomas’ story brought to the forefront the issue that Olympians are celebrities, but for many of them, their success comes with an expiration date.
It was Thomas’ story that made me even more intrigued by Melissa Rauch’s movie The Bronze. Rauch is mostly known for her role as Dr. Bernadette Rostenkowski-Wolowitzon on the wildly successful comedy The Big Bang Theory and I first heard her about her movie in July, 2015 when she was a guest on Pilar Alessandra’s screenwriting podcast, “On the Page.”
The movie centers on Hope Ann Greggory, who bronzed at the Olympics by prevailing over a performance-incurred injury and who became America’s hero – it resembled Kerri Strug whose vault in Atlanta 1996 after an injury earned her a chapter in Olympic history. Hope stays in the moment even though she’s aged, using her fame to get free meals. She still lives at home in the basement, steals from her father and is unemployed. When her former coach commits suicide, she is offered a cool half million dollars to train the newest town prodigy. However, Hope decides to sabotage her career instead.
Right now, media is eating up the fact that Rauch’s movie bombed at the box office and it did. According to EW, it made less than $400 per theater. In my opinion, that happened for two reasons. First, promotion on the movie was non-existent. I haven’t seen one trailer on television or in the movies. Has the production company forgotten about tie-ins? Why wasn’t the movie tied into the upcoming 2016 Summer Olympics? Who knows what the company was thinking.
The other reason The Bronze didn’t do well was because it was so completely over the top and was missing a few elements that would have been an easy fix and made the movie so much more than it was. In a good movie, there is such a thing as a character arc. You can hate the character in the beginning, but with some teasers of the good person they can become, you begin to see the character change and you start to relate and ultimately the character. Not here. Hope was not a likeable character from the get go and I didn’t really like her much at the end either. A friend reminded me that even Tonya Harding, who was considered the bad girl of skating, knew how to turn it on at times for the cameras.
(Ironically, it was announced this week that actress Margot Robbie will star in I, Tonya, a script by Steven Rogers about the story of Tonya Harding. No director has been announced yet, but we’ll keep you posted.)
Hope’s father, who is played by the talented Gary Cole, also doesn’t have much of a character arc either until the one time he yells at her. There was no emotion when Hope talks to vulgarly to him and we didn’t even get much of a backstory between Hope and her dad other than her mom died when she was little.
Hope’s profanity and raunchy talk seemed way too forced. If Rauch was trying to separate herself from her television character, this definitely showed another side to her, but I wish it would have been in a much more dramatic fashion. The gymnastic sex scene, which got laughs when the show debuted at the Sundance Film Festival, got laughs in my movie theater too, but the rest of the movie really didn’t so the scene again seemed very out of place. After awhile, I started feeling like I was watching Bernadette as a gymnastics coach.
I’ve seen some reviews that The Bronze has been called a comedy or a satire, but I think this movie struggled to be a drama with some comedy moments. Maybe if it had been released this summer with the Olympic tie-in it would have been more successful. Unfortunately, we’ll never know.
