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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
THE FIGHTER This boxing biopic’s biggest surprise might be how close it sticks to the basics. It’s a tried-and-true tale of a working-class guy using his fists to overcome the usual ’ities: poverty, adversity, and obscurity, all with the help of a good woman in his corner. Few conceits of the genre are unused. There’s even—in 2010!—a training montage set to a pop song. This shouldn’t come as a total surprise. One of The Fighter’s three credited screenwriters, Paul Tamasy, also unleashed Air Bud on an unsuspecting, innocent public. But while you would expect this from a man who came up with a basketball-playing pooch, it’s a little shocking to see it from the hands of director David O. Russell. For all their tweeness and pretensions, his previous films I Heart Huckabees and Three Kings at least had a sort of personal stamp—no one else could have made them. That’s not to say The Fighter is bad. Although it doesn’t stray from the tracks laid by Rocky and numerous other predecessors, the film has its own shambling, low-key charms, with Russell clearly preferring the family comedy elements over the pugilism (of which, there’s not a whole lot for a boxing movie). The Fighter follows the real-life early career of Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg), a low-level junior welterweight scraping by in white, working-class Lowell, Massachusetts in the mid-’90s. It’s something of an origin story, really, as The Fighter ends well before the three brutal scraps against Arturo Gatti earlier this decade that made Ward a household name (at least, in households that watch a lot of boxing on pay-per-view). When we meet him in the movie, he’s being trained by his half-brother, Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale), a crackhead and former boxer who’s still basking in the glow of his freak win over Sugar Ray Leonard some 15 years earlier. His career, and life, is managed by his mom, Alice (a great Melissa Leo). The boxing equivalent of a stage mother, this iron-fisted woman with staggering bad taste rules over the brothers and their seven horrifying sisters. (Their number, trashiness, and the fact they all seem to live together sometimes give the movie a kind of twisted, fairy-tale vibe.) But Ward eventually finds a reason to escape his family’s clutches and the mismatched fights they arrange for him when he meets Charlene (Amy Adams), a college dropout and bartender who convinces him to hire a new manager for a shot at glory. The filmmakers have made much of the technical accuracy of the fighting, with Mark Wahlberg having built a gym in his house to train in. The boxing is clearly less crisp and stagey than in a comic book affair like Rocky. But how real does it look? That’s for aficionados to judge. I’ve only ever seen a handful of fights, and the last time I threw a punch Kurt Cobain was still alive. But to this novice, the blows still seem a little too precise, although Russell uses dissolves to convince us we’re watching highlights of a fight.
Whatever one thinks of his boxing, Wahlberg’s acting is adequate in a
role that doesn’t demand much outside the ring, but this is really
Bale’s movie. His Eklund is a wound-up, chatty string of nervous energy,
incapable of sitting still (he’s first seen on a couch compulsively
swishing his legs). He has a sort of goofy good nature, and every
feeling that flickers through him instantly translates into action. It’s
a showy role, and as with The Machinist, the famously dedicated
Bale lost a lot of weight for it. But his method acting hell pays off,
and it’s a touching performance. Leo, as the jealous matriarch of this
odd clan, has perhaps a trickier job, and she does it wonderfully. She’s
ridiculous, stomping around in her high heels and barking in a broad Masshole accent, but she’s never a cartoon.
Brendon Nafziger
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