This tale of a boxer's Rocky-like ascent is an affecting study of the pain caused by dysfunctional families
In the 1890s, the reputation of the cinema was seriously, possibly permanently, tarnished in the eyes of moralists and opinion-formers through the movie pioneers' preoccupation with filming prize fights, then, as now, regarded as an unrespectable activity. The fascination continued as Hollywood turned the noble art into the subject of a movie genre and a metaphor for the social struggle and for life itself.
Every comedian from Chaplin to Jerry Lewis went into the ring at some time or other and most stars found themselves putting on the gloves or playing managers and trainers. The best boxing movies have been about defeat, whether glorious or abject, about the loss or retention of dreams. The least interesting have been triumphalist stories that culminate in championship fights.
There have been fewer boxing films in recent years, probably because of the lessening of interest in the sport and the only two made this century that immediately come to mind are both biographies of boxers whose careers follow a familiar dramatic arc in overcoming adversities and setbacks to win major titles. The first is Michael Mann's Ali (2001), featuring Will Smith as Muhammad Ali, the other Ron Howard's Cinderella Man (2005), starring Russell Crowe as the Depression-era fighter James Braddock.
Now there's David O Russell's The Fighter, in which Mark Wahlberg plays "Irish" Micky Ward, who was still taking serious punishment when Mann's biopic was released. If Ward's name is less familiar to most filmgoers, it's because Ali and Braddock were heavyweights and undisputed champions. Ward was a welterweight (in the crucial fight that provides the climax for the picture, both he and his British opponent, the Liverpool-born Shea Neary, weighed in at 10st 6lb) and won a World Boxing Union title which is far from undisputed.
Micky Ward's story, however, if the screenplay by Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson is anything to go by, is quite as extraordinary as the others with as many low points, though fewer major high ones. The most frequently quoted line of late 20th-century poetry is probably the opening of Philip Larkin's "This Be The Verse": "They fuck you up, your mum and dad". Had he lived to see The Fighter, Larkin would have found it necessary to add the line: "And so do your older brother and sisters." Because the movie is about a classically dysfunctional family that is pulled apart by internecine violence of a physical and emotional kind, then drawn together by an against-the-odds boxing triumph.
The film begins in 1993 in the run-down, post-industrial town of Lowell, Massachusetts, where the handsome, withdrawn, quietly spoken 27-year-old Micky's career has stalled after early success and he's working as a road paver. Divorced and with limited access to his little daughter, he's a warm-up fighter, a stepping stone for the careers of more promising pugilists on the way up. His extrovert half-brother, Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale), is an infinitely worse case. Dicky is a drunken, womanising crackhead who calls himself the "Pride of Lowell" and lives off the memory of the night when he floored the titleholder Sugar Ray Leonard, though most people think Leonard slipped. Dicky has persuaded Micky that his role as trainer is essential to the younger brother's success, just as their strident, domineering mother Alice (Melissa Leo) is convinced that he owes everything to her determined management.
In fact, they are a pair of albatrosses around his neck, crippling handicaps who are destroying his career. Standing on the sidelines are Micky's six sisters and half-sisters, foul-mouthed harridans with that hard, prematurely aged look of poor, hard-drinking, heavy-smoking women. There's also a cowed father trying to help his son but terrified of his wife and of the chorus of harpies she leads.
The group dynamics of this rowdy household are handled by director Russell with great unpatronising skill in his best film for years, though his most conventional. Into this menage comes Charlene (Amy Adams), a tough barmaid at a local saloon, who once had an athletic scholarship to university but dropped out. She's a spirited woman, who gives as good as she gets, and believes she can free Micky from his family shackles. Her uphill struggle appears to be helped when the self-deceiving Dicky is jailed for fraud, assault, theft and attacking the police. He emerges from prison a different, improved man but still a danger to the diffident, dithering Micky.
This is a frighteningly funny, oddly touching movie that never flinches from or attempts to sentimentalise the grotesquely embarrassing Dicky or to turn Micky into a liberated spirit. Both Wahlberg and Bale are excellent in their different registers, as are Melissa Leo and Amy Adams as the differently calibrated women. Bale, Leo and Adams have rightly received Oscar nominations and this is indeed an actors' film that draws its power and moral energy from the interaction of this ensemble. It's more about family than boxing and what's worth bearing in mind is that after the climactic fight, handled with traditional triumphalism � la Rocky, Micky had three murderous encounters with the late Arturo Gatti, all ending with both in hospital. A shot of the real Micky and Dicky included in the film's final credits shows what havoc 20 years in the ring can wreak on a man's face.
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