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A story about fighting your way to independence
THE FIGHTER:
Directed by David O. Russell.
Written by Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy and Eric
Johnson. Cinematography, Hoyte van Hoytema.
Music, Michael Brook. Starring Mark Wahlberg,
Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Melissa Leo. Paramount
Pictures, 2010. R. 114 minutes. 44444
E
xtending Boston’s banquet at the
cineplex this year, The Fighter,
which takes place in the Boston
suburb of Lowell, joins The Town, Knight
and Day and Shutter Island at the table. Of
these fi lms, only The Fighter transcends
its setting. What may seem like a double
dip into genre — Boston and boxing — is
actually a piece of bravura fi lmmaking, a
regional fi lm only in the sense that local
history and custom add fl avor to the core
themes of the fi lm. Western Massachusetts,
with its swagger and sway, its twin loves
of sports and booze, suffuses but doesn’t
swallow The Fighter, a fi lm of such
ambition and craft that it achieves a kind
of timeless quality by its fi nal act. Rare is
the drama that manages to be about sports
without falling to its knees in sports cliché.
Instead, The Fighter focuses on the toil that
amateur sports takes on family, friendships
and the athlete himself.
The fi lm’s structure is a work of art.
Closely based upon a true story, The
Fighter uses a fi lm-within-a-fi lm to tell
the story of a middling welterweight
boxer, Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg), and
his brother and trainer, Dicky Ecklund
(Christian Bale), a former boxing champ.
As the fi lm opens, a documentary crew is
trailing Dicky, who claims to be mounting a
comeback. But Dicky, who rarely changes
clothes, whose eye sockets are cavities
of sleeplessness and suffering, doesn’t
strike you as the most reliable type. When
Dicky re-enacts his most famous fi ght, a
1978 bout with Sugar Ray Leonard, while
squatting in a crack house, director David
O. Russell (Three Kings, I ♥ Huckabees)
cuts in actual footage of the fi ght, so we
can feel how low Dicky has fallen. And
that documentary? It’s called High on
Crack Street: Lost Lives in Lowell.
With Dicky increasingly unreliable,
Alice Ecklund (Melissa Leo), the mother
to both brothers — in addition to seven
charmless daughters — is exposed as
the controlling matriarch, a woman
whom Charlene (Amy Adams), Micky’s
girlfriend, sees clearly as a drag on Micky.
Micky just wants a title shot before he’s
too old to try, but his family sees him as
a stepping stone, a good boxer rather than
a great one. He’s their payday, the family
cash cow, and they don’t mind putting
Micky in harm’s way if it means even a
modest paycheck.
For an idea of the chaos Micky faces,
look no further than his boxing corner,
where his co-trainers are Dicky, a drug
addict, and a local Lowell cop. At the calm
center of everything sits Micky, played by
Wahlberg as a young man of gentle defi ance
— a Dirk Diggler with a few more losses
under his belt. While Wahlberg cements his
reliable standing with a solid and thorough
performance, one for which he trained and
studied for four years, his fellow actors
each give career-defi ning performances. If
you aspire to act, The Fighter is an acting
clinic. Watch Adams’ face as Wahlberg
wallops a bar patron to protect her honor;
watch Wahlberg’s expression when he gets
her phone number. Observe Melissa Leo’s
face as she realizes what Dicky really
is — or Dicky’s face as he sings to her
so that she might slide back into denial.
The entire entourage as they enter Bally’s
casino in Atlantic City is a piece of perfect
Scorsese-esque stagecraft, and one of the
reasons we’ll be watching this fi lm on
Sunday afternoons 20 years from now. A
fi lm about learning to look out for yourself
when those who should be looking out for
you can’t, The Fighter is easily among the
best fi lms of this year or any other.
ew
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