Best Cast of the Year?

Rating: 8/10 (6 January 2011)

A terrific underdog story brought to the screen by David O. Russell ("Three Kings," "I Heart Huckabees") and acted by one of the best ensembles assembled for a movie this year.
Mark Wahlberg plays Micky Ward, a young man from working-class Lowell, MA who rose from humble beginnings and a suffocatingly dysfunctional family to become a professional boxing champ. Christian Bale gives one of the performances of the year as Micky's brother, Dicky, a one-time champ himself (known for knocking down Muhammed Ali), wasting away as a crack addict and reliving his glory days through his brother. Amy Adams and Melissa Leo play two of the women in Micky's life, one his girlfriend and the other his overly-involved mother, and a bevy of unknown but realistic-looking actresses play Micky's big-haired and big-mouthed sisters.
Add "The Fighter" to the list of movies that have made working-class Boston and its environs look like one of the worst places on earth to live, full of crass, stupid people whose favorite pastimes are brawling and poking their noses into everyone's business. But though the environment brought to life by "The Fighter" is depressing, the movie is anything but. It's a very different movie from Russell's "Huckabees," a film I adored, but yet his fingerprints are all over it, and its cast gels in the same exhilarating way that the cast of "Huckabees" did, sending you out on a high on the strength of the sheer talent on display.
Certainly one of the best movies I've seen this year.
Grade: A