Toronto Film Review: Jake Gyllenhaal in ‘Stronger’
Jake Gyllenhaal is superb in David Gordon Green's moving Boston Marathon bombing drama.
- Andrew Barker, Variety

September 9th, 2017 - Sometimes movies impress you with their formal daring, their transgressiveness, their experimental boldness. Sometimes movies win you over with visual spectacle, novelty, unpredictability. And sometimes movies don’t necessarily have any of those qualities, they just flat-out work. David Gordon Green’s “Stronger,” a familiar yet undeniably moving film about Jeff Bauman, the everyman Bostonian who lost both his legs in the 2013 Marathon bombing, is a movie that just works.

It works, even though there are plenty of reasons to be suspicious of it. It’s a true story, cloaked in prestige trappings, about overcoming impossible odds. It’s a film about the Boston Marathon bombing that comes less than a year after Peter Berg’s “Patriots Day,” and heir to a long line of sometimes manipulative fact-based films that have seized on a moment of national tragedy to tell an inspirational tale. But then, “Stronger” is an inspirational tale that acknowledges easy inspirational tales are often nonsense. As he follows Jeff from the moment a terrorist bomb changes his life through his long, difficult rehabilitation, Green looks for small but meaningful ways to complicate and deepen the well-trod story he’s telling, and by the end, those complications help the film earn its uplift.

Find Variety's full review of the film here, and The Guardian's review here. "Stronger" is now playing nationwide. For more of David's work, please visit Chelsea.com.