The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki (shot in classical black-and-white) recalls the old down-and-out boxer stories that enchanted old Hollywood. The myth of uneducated and unsophisticated vagrants, blessed only with the talent of giving and taking a beating, fighting their way into society’s good graces has been a pipe dream of working class roughnecks since the Great Depression and has since become a popular locality for Hollywood formula and romanticism. The film shies from America’s old boxing myths by truthfully recounting the days leading up to the Olli’s big break as he prepares to joust the American featherweight champion, Davey Moore.
Although seemingly attuned to classical underdog conventions, this brief and meditative study on real life prize fighter, Olli Mäki, is more about the man’s existential self reevaluation in the midst of his fast rising (and even faster vanishing) celebrity.
Olli (Jarkko Lahti), a Finnish amateur boxer, with a solid fight record, a clean slate and a chip on his shoulder, is chosen as Finland’s top contender to face the featherweight champion of the world. This fight is destined to be the biggest in Finnish’s history, but Olli remains reasonably unconvinced by his own abilities. Pushing him is his antsy, fame-hungry manager Elis (Eero Milonoff), a man whose unease as a husband and father press him to push Olli beyond his physical and mental capabilities in order to sustain both their futures in sports. Olli on the other hand veers from the dubious promises of fame and finds himself drawn to the prospect of marrying his sweetheart Raija (Oona Airola) to whom he devotes all his attention.
The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki imparts an understated beauty to otherwise predictable truisms. The absentminded Olli seems only capable of seeing life as a means of experiencing simple pleasures and relishing moments instilled in memories, rather than the moments inscribed in fight records, and captured on film. As a contrast, Elis’s arrogant search for fame shows a shallow, futile effort in pleasing people who mean the littlest (and, at the same time, the most) to him. There’s no denying the shallowness of Elis’ greed yet we can’t help but see his greed as a reprieve from life’s dissatisfaction. The amount of pathos drawn from him is unmistakable and, at times, even deeply affecting. He is the film’s most tragic illustration of personal and professional failure, a cautionary tale beset on human values—not unlike the bums searching for similar glory in John Huston’s Fat City (1972).
This film builds on expectations in a way that arouses the viewer into anticipating Hollywood’s old cliches and rubberstamps. Olli Mäki’s upcoming bout subjects the boxer to physical hardship, mental toils and emotional grief; in a more predictable narrative this unfolding of trials and tribulations dramatically invites an underdog victory or a martyred defeat by the film’s conclusion. The type of endings American sports films teaches us to expect. However, when The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki subverts these kinds of expectations it doesn’t simply disappoint viewer anticipation but seeks to reinvent what we should actually expect. Olli Mäki allows us to reflect on personal satisfaction, emotional fulfillment and other victories (and losses) ignored by Hollywood’s superficial formulas.
In a sense The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki seems to overturn the boxing movie’s every custom and touchstone (but without the pretentious self-consciousness one might expect). And while the film’s jovial melodrama, lightheartedness and romance may only amount to facile life-lessons (metaphors which meek in comparison to revisionists classics by John Huston and Martin Scorsese), The Happiest Day still proves that a genre beset by endless clichés and stereotypes can still surprise at every turn and endlessly captivate us to life’s small charms.
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