The Fighter

I pretty much hated David O. Russell's last film, I Heart Huckabees, which I found to be self-indulgent twaddle. For The Fighter, a conventionally-structured sports drama, he came in as a hired hand, and shows some amazing chops as a visual stylist, particularly in scenes taking place in the boxing ring, a familiar place in movies over the many years. But I was less impressed with the drama outside the ring.

The film is the story of Micky Ward and his family. A boxer from Lowell, Massachusetts, he is managed by his mother, trained by his brother, and lovingly rooted on by his seven sisters. Sounds pretty good, but the mother (Melissa Leo) is near psychotic, the brother is a crack addict, and the sisters are a seven-headed hydra.

But Micky relies on his family, even after they urge him to fight a boxer outweighing him by twenty pounds. He loses, which sets him back in his quest for the championship. He begins to date a bartender (Amy Adams), who makes him see his family in a different light, and along with his other trainer, a sensible police officer, decides to try it a different way.

Though Micky, played by Mark Wahlberg, is at the center of the film, it's the satellites around him that reflect most of the light, particularly his brother Dicky, played by Christian Bale. Also a fighter, who spends his life trying to relive the glory of knocking down Sugar Ray Leonard, he has delusions about making a comeback, and lives vicariously through his brother. A loose-limbed motor-mouth, Bale plays Dicky as a kind of pathetic clown. It was as if Bale had watched episodes of Seinfeld and modeled his performance on Cosmo Kramer. Not only does he display some oddly endearing physical comedy, but he has some of Kramer's wacky get-rich schemes, like trying to convince some Cambodians to invest in a pyramid scheme. One of the Cambodians, who speaks little English, can only say, "You rip us off!"

During the first part of the film, which Russell stages as a film-within-a-film being made by an HBO documentary crew, I felt at sea, as the images and characters come by in a hurlyburly. I can appreciate that this tactic was used in order to better express exposition, but I found it to have a distancing effect, and I had a sour taste in my mouth--I really did not like these people. It was only when the film calmed down and settled on Wahlberg and Adams (with Bale in jail) that I got into the groove. I was very impressed with Adams, who I've hoped would take on a role opposite her princesses and nuns, and she delivers with the foul-mouthed woman who takes a strong stance against the women in Wahlberg's family. I admired the character, and I admired the way Adams inhabited her.

The weakest character in the film is that of Micky. I don't blame Wahlberg, who seems right in the part (he shows off some great guns), but the script, which doesn't seem interested in him. We know Adams loves him, and we know he has an ex-wife who hates him, but we're not sure why. He just sort of floats through the movie, a cypher who is unable to break with his family. The antics of Bale, Leo, and the steely performance of Adams just leaves him in the dust.

The film also suffers from an uncomfortable shifting in tone. It's frequently very funny, such as the rough-and-tumble sass of the sisters, and Bale's repeated attempts to escape his mother by jumping out the window of a crackhouse into a garbage bin. But I didn't think they meshed well with what came before and after.

By the film's final act, though, when Bale's character turned a corner in his rehabilitation and made a selfless decision, the film began to grow on me. A scene set in prison, while he watches the movie made about him and finally figures out it's about crack addiction, is moving. The final boxing match, in which Wahlberg goes to London to fight for the title, was thrillingly presented. My only quibble is the superfluous use of boxing commentary by Jim Lampley and Larry Merchant--they were telling us nothing that we weren't already seeing.

The Fighter is solid entertainment, and has a gifted performance by Amy Adams, but I don't think it's a top-tier film. It will probably get a nomination for a Best Picture Oscar, but I don't think it's that good.

My grade for The Fighter: B