WELCOME TO `MOVIE CITY' OR MOVIE CITY MANIA FOR 5

DAYS, MUSIC CITY REVELS IN THE CINEMA

KEVIN NANCE STAFF WRITER

06/06/1999

The Tennessean

CITY

1K

(Copyright 1999)

The 30th annual Nashville Independent Film Festival gets under way

this week in what promises to be its biggest and best-attended

edition ever.

Hitman Hart, Wrestling with Shadows (1:45 p.m. Thursday), directed

by Paul Jay. This documentary, which follows a year in the life of

Bret "Hitman" Hart a former champion of the World Wrestling

Federation is one of the best and most entertaining films of the

festival. It has the surest sense of story and character development

of all the documentaries and is far better in those departments than

most of the fictional films.

And that's the one problem: Hitman Hart seems almost too good to

be true. The storyline of Hart's growing friction with WWF owner

Vince McMahon, their eventual falling out and McMahon's ultimate

double-crossing of Hart in the wrestler's final WWF bout before

leaving for Ted Turner's rival organization is a classic professional

wrestling plot; it's hard not to suspect that the documentary is

manipulating the facts (and us) in an only slightly more subtle fashion

than pro wrestling itself.

But even if the suspicion is correct, Hitman Hart is still a wonderful

film, full of suspense, dramatic tension and, given the subject, a

strange kind of melancholy. Hart is a terrific performer in and out of

the ring, exuding gentleness and decency as well as a rising tide of

disgust at the excesses and increasing moral ambiguity of pro

wrestling. And the sequences in which he introduces us to his

extended family, all of whom are involved in wrestling (his brother

Owen Hart was killed recently in a WWF stunt that went awry), are

fascinating. If there's one film in the festival not to miss, it's this one.

Highly recommended.