The Fighter (Review)

Reviews can be hard to write for any number of reasons, the most frequent being that a movie is just okay. These are the hardest movies to write about, as they are exceedingly normal and unsurprising in every way. However, The Fighter is not one of those movies. Writing on this film is difficult because it is hard to express in words just how thoroughly I loved this movie. I loved just about every scene. I loved every second of the story it told. I loved the performances across the board. On the surface, it’s a conventional boxing movie, but The Fighter as a whole is no less than a triumph, throwing you right into the center of Lowell, Massachusetts and the family which has made boxing its life, for better or for worse. This is all elevated by a supporting performance by Christian Bale which may be the performance of the year.

Mark Wahlberg plays Micky Ward, the younger half-brother of Dicky Eklund (Bale), who was able put up a fight against Sugar Ray Leonard back in his heyday. Dicky is referred to as “the pride of Lowell”. Everywhere Dicky goes he draws a crowd of admirers, and Micky lives always in his shadow. Micky’s boxing career seems to merely exist so that people pay more attention to Dicky, and Micky’s over controlling family seems intent on derailing his career before it takes off.

Worse yet, Dicky (who functions as Micky’s trainer) is addicted to crack. An HBO film crew has come to Lowell with the intention of filming Dicky’s re-ascension to boxing supremacy. Eventually they just end up making a movie about crack addiction, with Dicky as the subject. Meanwhile, Micky’s career is floundering, as he ends up fighting a number of impossible opponents, mostly due to the scheduling of his mother. So devoted to family is Micky that he turns down offer after offer which would no doubt lead to success. Instead he’s stuck in boxing purgatory, with a crackhead brother/trainer and a family that hovers over him incessantly.

Swooping in to save him from this cycle of failure is Charlene, played by Amy Adams. She’s a bartender in a local, you guessed it, bar. As their relationship becomes more serious, she becomes convinced that the best thing for Micky to do is to separate himself from his family and focus on his boxing career instead of his brother.

Micky Ward is a unique protagonist in a movie such as The Fighter simply because he’s so easily manipulated and eager to please. He wants to remain a family man, but he also wants to be a successful boxer on his own terms, not just the stepping stone little brother of the crackhead who made Sugar Ray Leonard fall over. Boxing movies usually give us heroes who beat the crap out of people because they need to, and the fights become a natural extension of what happens outside the ring. Not the case with The Fighter. Micky is a calm young man who only turns on the boxing switch when he needs to. When he’s not competing, it’s his family and Charlene that’s doing the fighting.

Directed by David O. Russell, The Fighter is the rare movie which is just a joy to sit back and watch unfold. Sure, the arc is conventional, but the film works equally well inside and outside the ring. The dialogue is not made up of grand, quotable proclamations but instead of real characters saying utterly real things, often profane and without much grace. This only serves to give the film its sense of realism, so that when we reach the expected destination the result is strangely and gloriously powerful. This is the perfect film to bring director Russell back into the fold, as the last film he released was 2004’s I Heart Huckabees.

The Fighter is remarkable not only for its ability to recreate the Lowell community but to drop you right in the middle of it. This is not accomplished merely by dropping the r’s but by giving the film a sense of atmosphere, time and place. The terrific performances also help, with Wahlberg nailing the tough guy who’s so afraid of letting everyone down, Amy Adams as his increasingly involved girlfriend, and oh my lord Christian Bale. Here is an actor who was in danger of playing Bruce Wayne over and over again, but here he slims down to drug addict levels and gives an energetic performance that lifts The Fighter from very good to downright sublime. His work here reminds me, in all the best possible ways, of Robert DeNiro's breakthrough work in Scorsese's Mean Streets. Seriously.

I am normally not one to fall for tricks like this. The by-the-book sports/boxing film has been done ad nauseam, The Fighter pulls it off so beautifully that I couldn’t help but be bowled over. Few times this year have I been so in love with a movie from the first second to the last. This may not be the most intelligent or descriptive review (what else is new, amirite?) but there are few ways a man can write “I really really loved it.” I was afraid I wouldn’t buy The Fighter, but I did. With interest.

Rating:  (out of 4)