Bigger movie review & film summary (2018)
Not really—it flashes back to the 1919 birth of Joe in Montreal, and his mother’s irritation that he’s not a girl. Ben is his younger brother, and as kids the two are fascinated by circus strongmen. Just as we’re getting settled in for a nice long flashback, and some illumination as to who the movie is going to pick as its central character, we’re back at the funeral home.
Eventually the brothers haul a sign in front of a storefront with the name “Weider” on it, and I’m like, “oh, of course, this is about Joe Weider, the bodybuilding guru I know almost nothing about except that he was a bodybuilding guru.”
At this point the movie (directed by George Gallo from a script Gallo co-wrote with Andy Weiss, and, to judge by the spacing out of the credits, another script that was written by Brad Furman and Ellen Furman) settles in to a pretty conventional and linear and coherent biopic mode. Joe Weider, played with square-jawed stolidity by Tyler Hoechlin, is a person of very narrow focus. Obsessed with the cultivation of physical perfection, he spends hours drawing an ideal Adonis. He concocts exercise routines and studies diet, and puts his findings in a fanzine that expands into a genuine mainstream magazine. He is met frequently with anti-Semitism both casual and pressing, and when he and Ben get into the mainstream of what in the '30s and '40s was still a very small culture, they make a lifelong enemy of …well, in this movie it’s an entirely fictional character named Bill Hauk. Hauk is represented as a bodybuilding contest promoter and publisher who’s a loudmouth bigot with thin skin and violent tendencies.
"Bigger" portrays the bodybuilding field as pretty steadfast, if not wholly thrifty, brave, clean and reverent. Some characters are repelled by Weider’s fascination with male physique, thinking him gay. He is not, not that there would have been anything wrong with that, and the movie skates over the homoerotic side of the culture entirely. Steroids and prior performance-boosters don’t get any mention either. Weider has a resolve that’s kind of Randian—Harold Roark with a barbell. A guy like him can make an interesting movie, but “Bigger,” executive produced by Ben Weider’s son Eric, is a bit of a secular hagiography. Joe is portrayed as a prophet, envisioning planet fitness, so to speak, before anyone else.
