The writer-director’s story of a British female wrestler striving to make it big in the Us winningly balances oddball humour with affection for the antics of the WWE“These are big movies,” insists Michael Lerner’s studio boss in the Coen brothers’ 1991 hit Barton Fink, “about big men – in tights, both physically and mentally!” He’s trying to explain to John Turturro’s angsty writer the inherent parameters of a wrestling movie, insisting: “We don’t put Wally Beery in a fruity movie about suffering.” Yet just as William Faulkner reportedly did uncredited rewrites on Beery’s 1932 picture Flesh, so writer-director Stephen Merchant here manages to subvert the genre and inject some of “that Barton Fink feeling” into this uplifting romp.
Inspired by Max Fisher’s similarly titled Channel 4 documentary about a Norwich wrestling clan, Fighting With My Family is a hugely likable underdog tale, packing plenty of crowd-pleasing comedy wallop,
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