Coulda been a contender

Rating: 6/10 (10 January 2013)

We shouldn't really be surprised by roughness in a boxing movie anymore, but in The Fighter David O. Russel presents us with an image of poverty and desperation that feels much more stark -- and, importantly, much more contemporary -- than the ghettoes of Raging Bull or the working-class district of Rocky. This feels like a working-class film too, unashamedly putting narrative before aesthetics and emotion before intellect.
That narrative is nothing extraordinary -- it fits pretty comfortably into the standard sports movie archetype, in which the growth of character is directly parallelled by a growth in athletic success. There's a kind of simplistic and sentimental ring to the script, which seems too quick to cast moral judgement on its characters The performances are also not as good as you've heard. Melissa Leo is admittedly good, burying her usual hardness beneath an outsized overbearing mother, although there are times when she comes off as a cartoon. Amy Adams is forgettable, Christian Bale is gimmicky, and Mark Wahlberg is about what you would expect. The setting is the real star, no matter how many Oscar statuettes the humans involved can muster.
Still, for all its flaws The Fighter has a good heart, and is at the very least the kind of solid drama you can respectably fritter away some time with. As a boxing quasi-fan, I would have liked Ward's fights with Gatti to be more than a footnote, but I understand that the focus of the film was on his struggles to reach that level. And it meets that goal fairly well, resulting in an entertaining if not particularly deep film.