Old Yorker

David O Russell (2010)

Set in Lowell, Massachusetts, this is – most of the time – a familial horror story.  The progress as a boxer of Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) is shackled by the tyrannical demands of family ‘loyalty’ and it’s a family of monsters:  his blinkered, domineering mother Alice (Melissa Leo), who’s also Micky’s manager; his ex-fighter, crackhead brother and trainer Dicky (Christian Bale); a chorus of thickly vicious, largely indistinguishable sisters, in thrall to these two stronger personalities.  I engaged emotionally with what was going on to the extent that I was impatient and sometimes desperate for Micky to get away from this lot and go with the opposing camp in his life and career.  They include his relatively sane and docile father George (Jack McGee), another coach (Mickey O’Keefe), and his girlfriend Charlene (Amy Adams).   After a spell inside for drug offences, Dicky returns expecting to resume as trainer, which brings to a head the rivalry between the two factions.  There’s a showdown in the gym, Charlene walks out on Micky, Dicky goes to her house to try and make peace and – mirabile dictu – succeeds.   From this point on, the former enemies coalesce as one big happy family, cheering Micky to his surprise victory in a world title fight that provides the film’s climax.  The Fighter isn’t that interesting and I didn’t enjoy it while the verbal violence was eclipsing anything going on in the boxing ring – but there was no denying that David O Russell, working from a screenplay by Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson, was giving the boxing biopic a resuscitative new treatment.  The triumphant ending may send audiences away from the cinema feeling happy but it robs The Fighter of what seemed distinctive about it.   Russell’s approach is canny, though, because he recognises that people will warm to the chief monsters – so breathtakingly awful that, if you’re going to tolerate them at all, you have to find them funny – as well as to quiet, decent Micky, who’s both a no-hoper in the family personality stakes and an underdog in terms of his professional standing.   We always want to see things work out for people to whom we’re well disposed.  The Fighter’s eleventh hour shift into a different kind of film allows that to happen.

The garish verve of the characters and the plotting make The Fighter feel like a distillation of what we expect from the genre.  The bonkers, aggressive ambition of Alice (‘All we ever wanted was for you to be world champion’) connects her with pushy mothers in other constellations of the biopic universe.   At the start of The Fighter, Dicky is telling people that the camera crew following him around are making a documentary about the boxing comeback he’s going to make (he’s pushing forty).  It turns out that the documentary’s subject is crack addiction in Lowell and Dicky is featured because he’s now locally as notorious as a criminal and a drug addict as he used to be as a boxer.   He’s in prison by the time the documentary screens on HBO:  watching it, he’s so appalled by shots of his young son crying that he resolves to mend his ways.  Russell handles these elements shrewdly:  Alice gets to see her crazy dreams come true and Dicky is redeemed but the wacky characters they’ve established don’t change.  For the audience, it’s the best of both worlds.  And Micky’s rags-to-riches story is dramatically compressed.  Early on he’s so firmly entrenched in palookaville that he’s not even paired with people in the same weight division (when his opponent drops out, the replacement is a fighter twenty pounds heavier than Micky, who is given a humiliating hiding).  A relatively successful run under new management leads to a fight with an undefeated hotshot Mexican.  The latter dominates in the early rounds and the ringside commentator says something like ‘This is sad to see:  Micky Ward is coming to the end of his career and he needs the money but he’s out of his depth here … ‘.   After being outpunched nearly throughout, Micky confounds expectations with a knockout in round nine.   In the dressing room afterwards, a promoter tells Micky that the Mexican, had he won, would have got a shot at the title – as Micky won, he gets it instead.  Is that really how it works?  The Mexican had won all sixteen of his previous fights, including fifteen Kos.  Micky has won twenty-seven, lost ten, and is well over thirty years old – not an exciting young prospect.

Of course Russell has the priceless advantage that he’s dealing with the life of a real person so The Fighter has the seal of ‘truth’.  (Mickey O’Keefe, who plays the reasonable trainer, really was part of Ward’s support team.)  Micky Ward was born in 1965; he was nearly thirty-five when he won the WBU light welterweight title in 2000, defeating the hitherto undefeated Briton Shea Neary (although this wasn’t Ward’s first title fight, according to Wikipedia).   His elder half-brother, Dicky Eklund (I assume the surname comes from a previous husband of Alice), eight years older than Micky, won nineteen of his twenty-nine fights over a ten-year period, ending in 1985.  As Dicky makes repeatedly clear throughout the film, his greatest moment in the ring came when, in his one shot at a world title in 1978, he floored Sugar Ray Leonard before losing on points.  (Leonard has a cameo as himself in The Fighter.)   It seems that gallant durability was Micky’s hallmark and Dicky’s achievement in taking Leonard the distance helps establish a family trait that Russell exploits to the full.   The film’s title is a further suggestion that the director is trying to bring out something essential about the nature of prize-fighting – and perhaps to convey the doggedly enduring popularity of this type of film too.    The title is apt for another reason:  by the end of The Fighter, you realise it could refer to any of the four principal characters, including Alice and Charlene.

Performances like the ones Christian Bale (Dicky) and Melissa Leo (Alice) give here require a lot of talent:  this doesn’t mean they’re great but it’s one explanation of why they’re winning prizes.   Bale’s hyper-hyperactivity is especially remarkable given how dull he was as Bruce Wayne in The Dark Knight (2008).  Although I felt we were seeing the actor performing to camera, the fact that, for much of the first half of the movie, Dicky is involved in the documentary makes it impossible to be sure of this, and we certainly believe that Dicky is incorrigibly a performer – exactly the kind of man who’d put on a show for a film crew.  We’re meant to assume his physique has been wasted by drugs although it’s less easy to accept that this wiry beanpole – his face is a cross between Ivan Lendl and Pete Postlethwaite – was ever a prize fighter.  It’s not a matter of not being able to take your eyes off Bale, more a case of not being able to hide from his bug-eyed stare.  Even so, it was clear, just from the few people in the Red Lion Street Odeon, what a strong connection Bale makes with the audience in this role.   At the end of The Fighter, we see the real Micky and Dicky:  the latter is described as ‘still a local hero’ and, in his mid-fifties, he’s so in your face that you begin to wonder if Christian Bale has been exaggerating after all.

The Fighter begins in the early 1990s (I was never clear how much time passed in the course of the movie) and the archive footage of the real Alice being interviewed before Dicky’s title fight with Sugar Ray Leonard suggests that she has aged very little in the interim.  Melissa Leo’s trimness is one of the best things about The Fighter:   She really inhabits her various trouser suits, which amount to a kind of working-class, mutton-dressed-as-lamb power-dressing.  You believe that Alice – who chain smokes, drinks regularly but never seems to eat – is keeping herself young both for her sons (certainly not for her husband) and to convince herself there’s still a future.  Here too there’s a difficulty in separating the actor’s playing from the character’s behaviour:  Leo looks to be repeating the same routine and you suspect there’s not a lot of depth to what she’s doing but you know these are also qualities of the woman she’s playing.

Amy Adams as Charlene is the only unalloyed pleasure in the film – partly because the character isn’t infuriating so you don’t need to worry about the actor making things worse, partly because it’s a relief to see Adams extending her character range and showing an emotional fluidity missing since Junebug (2005).  Although Charlene earns her living serving in a bar, she went to college – which is enough to condemn her in the eyes of Alice and the Neanderthal sorority in Micky’s family.  Adams’ characterisation, with its blend of sensitivity and combativeness, is much the richest in The Fighter.    Mark Wahlberg is now on the verge of being overpraised for the quietness of his portrait of Micky.  He gives a good, thoughtful performance and he’s physically convincing as a boxer (even if he’s surely heavier than the 146 pounds Micky weighs in at for his title fight).  The film does benefit from this relatively self-effacing centre that the showier performances can orbit.  But Wahlberg needs the pyrotechnics from others as much as they need him:  he’s an unexciting actor.

Ryan Gilbey’s admiring review in the New Statesman is bizarre.  He says of The Fighter ‘it’s no more a boxing movie than Vertigo is a film about vertigo’ but why does that dictate that the fight scenes should be (as he describes them) ‘artless’?  It’s no easier to believe that Russell intended these sequences, in Gilbey’s words, to ‘pass for pay-for-view’ than it is to think that most people who like The Fighter will do so because the boxing sequences aren’t well done.  The fist fights may be upstaged by the shouting matches in terms of violence but they’re smartly constructed and executed.  Gilbey welcomes Russell’s demonstration that ‘compromise can sometimes be the sweetest victory’ but the film doesn’t do anything to persuade us that the people concerned would have been capable of give and take or of growing to like each other:  in fact Russell may well have intuited that the rapprochement will be more fun because it’s so improbable.  Gilbey also commends The Fighter for ‘valu[ing] its working-class characters without needing to prettify or patronise them’ – but how much better is it to present Micky’s seven sisters as grotesque cartoons?  It’s true the main actors don’t condescend to their characters.  There is, though, a scene in which Micky takes Charlene to a movie:  it’s Belle Epoque, which they differently mispronounce and he sleeps through.  David O Russell avoids making fun of Micky and Charlene here only by the introduction of a ridiculous highbrow film buff, who assumes that he and the couple are kindred spirits and witters on about the cinematography etc.   This is a scene which film critics, thrilled to a get a sarcastic mention, will particularly enjoy.

8 February 2011