# Hitman Hart: Wrestling with Shadows (1998) (TV)

### reviewed by
Scott Renshaw

    HITMAN HART: WRESTLING WITH SHADOWS
    (A&E Cable Network)
    Featuring:  Bret Hart, Vince McMahon, Stu Hart.
    Director:  Paul Jay.
    Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
    Airs Saturday, December 26 at 12 noon EST/9 am PST on A&E.

SPECIAL NOTE: Longtime readers will realize that I am breaking with a longstanding tradition of reviewing only theatrical films. There is a very good reason. Please note the air times listed above and don't miss this one.

The best documentaries, like the best art of any kind, have always been about more than their easily-summarized subject. HOOP DREAMS may have been about high school basketball, but it was also about race, class and the cultural deification of athletics. Great documentary film-makers take individual lives and find stories that resonate beyond the individuals whose lives are being explored.

HITMAN HART: WRESTLING WITH SHADOWS is set in the world of professional wrestling, and shame on you if that's enough to keep you from watching. Paul Jay's documentary is a brilliant, riveting, touching and funny biographical study of a man who happens to be a professional wrestler: Calgary native Bret "The Hitman" Hart, a 40-year-old, 14-year veteran of the World Wrestling Federation and heavyweight champion crowd favorite when we meet him. Actually, "happens to be a wrestler" may be an understatement. In fact, Bret Hart's entire universe is wrestling -- his father Stu was a pro wrestler and promoter, his seven brothers also became wrestlers, and his four sisters all married wrestlers. In interviews with family members, we see how Stu's old-school style -- twisting opponents into excruciating submission holds until blood vessels burst in their eyes -- came to define not just Bret's wrestling persona, but his entire view of integrity via his relationship with his father. Manhood meant no compromise and no submission, inside the ring or out of it.

This background provides a crucial context for the central story of Bret's fall from grace within the WWF. He describes how his virtuous, heroic Hitman character became passe as anti-heroes like Stone Cold Steve Austin grew in popularity, leading WWF owner Vince McMahon to engineer Bret's shift from "good guy" to "bad guy." Yet even in that role Bret was able to remain true to himself, becoming a Canadian patriot who criticized the moral collapse of American society. Unfortunately, he extended that criticism to the WWF itself, arguing that the family entertainment morality plays of the 1980s glory days -- Hulk Hogan urging kids to "say their prayers and take their vitamins" -- had given way to increasing vulgarity and the glorification of villains. And McMahon, needless to say, was not pleased.

That conflict sets up a climactic showdown in Montreal between Bret and the WWF's reigning glamour boy, Shawn Michaels. Facing the end of his contract with the WWF -- perhaps due to financial pressure from Ted Turner's competing WCW, perhaps due to more personal issues -- Bret is asked to lose the championship match in Canada. The circumstances leading up to that request, including Bret's refusal of a sizable raise to jump ship to the WCW only months earlier out of loyalty to McMahon, leads Bret to hope there is some way he can leave his home country a winner. What follows is as tense and dramatic as any confrontation in any fictional sports film, this in a "sport" where the outcome is carefully choreographed ahead of time.

Viewers expecting HITMAN HART: WRESTLING WITH SHADOWS to be a behind-the-scenes expose of the "phony" wrestling world will find that, but only to a certain extent. They'll also find a man named Bret Hart who made the tragic mistake of attaching his identity to a fictional construct in a multi-million dollar business. As clearly as Vince McMahon is the villain of this piece, he also makes one extremely insightful comment about Bret Hart: "He forgot that this is sports entertainment." HITMAN HART: WRESTLING WITH SHADOWS is a tale of capitalism and personal integrity, and the extent to which one has anything to do with the other. It's a human drama, a social satire and a thrilling adventure. And it is not, repeat, _not_ "just about wrestling."

         On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 broken Harts:  10.

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