The Fighter, on the face of it, would not seem to be my kind of movie, and I went to it reluctantly. I did think that I ought to see it, and not just because of the Oscar buzz. Mark Wahlberg and Amy Adams are two stars who have never let me down, and I’d heard really great things about Melissa Leo. I’d like to say that Christian Bale was a draw, too, but although his work has always been interesting, it has also seemed intended to cloak the actor in plain sight, as though movie-making were the best way in the world of maintaining a very private life. It is also true that Mr Bale has never to my knowledge played the part of a character whom I’d want to grow up to be. Certainly this last part hasn’t been changed by David Russell’s film. Even after his dramatic conversion experience, Dickie Eklund remains an unattractive piece of work. But I came out of the theatre thrilled to death by the power of what I’d just seen, and I hope that no one will miss The Fighter because it’s “about boxing.” 

And it is about boxing. There were passages of family drama that led me to suspect that the pugilistics might be backgrounded, but that’s not what happens. In fact, I have never seen a movie that made boxing look so interestting. The final bout transformed me into a Mexican jumping bean, swaying with each blow; it’s a good thing that I sit in the back of the theatre. While nothing could ever make a boxing fan out of me, I saw that Mr Russell had always kept in view a distinction that Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) makes at the beginning, when he’s explaining boxing to Charlene (Amy Adams). There’s brawling, which is just guys exchanging blows, and there’s boxing, which is more like chess. Comparing boxing to chess might sound laughable, and most filmmakers would ask us to accept it on faith, but Mr Russell provides something close to a laboratory demonstration of the similarities. In almost every boxing scene that I’ve ever sat through, there’s a sense from the start that the fighters are giving their all to trying to win, as quickly as possible. But that’s not Micky Ward’s game, That Ward has a game is interesting. 

But I didn’t care about The Fighter because of the fighting. The multi-credited screenplay is a match of sorts between two venerable story lines. The one is a family tragedy: a heroic character isn’t strong enough, or mean enough, or whatever-you-like enough to step outside a toxic family circle, possibly because he is as addicted to the company of his relations as they’re addicted to trouble. The other is the modern American tale of rehab. The moment in which we find that we believe in the rehabilitation of Dickie Eklund, a former crack addict ( as well as the boxer who taught his little brother Micky everything he knows), the family tragedy story turns into a comeback story, and a very believable one. By this time, Micky has put together a team of supporters who agree on nothing so much as the importance of keeping Dickie out of Micky’s life. When Micky can’t decide between the warring camps (which we’re inclined, even though the movie turns out not to do, to see as good guys versus bad guys), his new friends leave him, and you think, uh-oh, so much for Micky.

But Dickie is awakened by their defection; and instead of taking advantage of his restored command of the field (as Micky’s trainer) he reaches out for the defectors’ support. As Charlene and O’Keefe (Mickey O’Keefe plays himself) understand, Micky’s dependence on his brother’s good advice is not weak or self-destructive: Dickie really does know the best moves. He also knows his brother better than anyone else. They don’t like Dickie, but they know that, so long as he’s clean, they have no good excuse for not working with him, so they undergo conversion experiences of their own. (Ms Adams is so good at registering the course of Charlene’s faith in Dickie that you think that you’re reading her mind.) It’s at this very point that the boxing story sweeps to the foreground for a stirring climax — a climax that would work out very differently if Micky’s various friends weren’t determined to get together to support him. 

Melissa Leo plays Alice Ward, the much-married mother of nine, among them the two boxers and six harridan Valkyries who hang out in her home and amplify her signs and signals. Alice is very much a type, but I’ve never seen the equal of Ms Leo’s impersonation. A hard and brittle hustler who’s too sentimental to grasp that she routinely favors her black sheep son, Dickie, over the straight-shooting Micky, Alice is all but blind to Dickie’s addiction. She’s as out of touch with reality as any of Tennessee Williams’s wilting Southern belles, but, being a lot tougher, she is not broken by the shattering portrayal of her family in an HBO documentary that is shown midway through the film. It’s unclear what she knows in advance about this project; one suspects that she has taken Dickie’s assurance that it’s about his comeback as the pride of Lowell, Massachusetts at his word. In fact, we don’t know different until just before the broadcast. The subject of the documentary is crack, and how completely it can ruin the life of someone like Dickie. It ends with his being led off to prison. In an addled attempt to raise money for Micky’s training, Dickie impersonates cops and shakes down the johns who pick up his tarts. It doesn’t take long for this scheme to come crashing down around him. Even for Alice, though, “documentary” doesn’t mean quite what it ought to, and when Dickie comes out of prison, she is almost eager to resume enabling him. She at risk of helping both of her sons right back into disappointment and failure. If The Fighter has a disappointment, it’s that Ms Leo is never given a scene to correspond to Mr Bale’s. 

Whether or not the filmmakers intended any such message, I watched The Fighter as itself something of a documentary, about the failure of our economy to provide millions of Americans with meaningful occupations even as it drowns them in consumerist trash. It is difficult to imagine why anyone with a interesting, well-paid job would take up professional boxing, and The Fighter does nothing to make it any easier.  

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Friday, January 21st, 2011 at 5:30 pm.