The Fighter Is A Champ

Rating: 9/10 (25 December 2010)

The Fighter is a movie that works on so many levels it's as dense as a black forest cake. Based on a true story set in Lowell, Massachusetts, about two boxing half brothers (their mother had a lot of love to give), Mickey Ward, played by Mark Wahlberg and Dicky Eklund, played by Christian Bale, it opens with Bale and Wahlberg sitting on a living room couch. Bale is a revelation; motor-mouthed, twitchy, punchy, and doesn't seem to have a lot upstairs. Believe that at your peril. Wahlberg sits quietly next to him. He's the kind of actor you can actually watch thinking.
Dicky's claim to fame is that he once knocked down Sugar Ray Leonard (who makes a brief cameo appearance). Now both he and Mickey are part of a road crew when they're not in a gym. Dicky trains Mickey for fights his mother the gorgon manager sets up for him, one of which puts him in the hospital.
The way The Fighter surprises and confounds your expectations keeps you on the edge of your seat, along with director David O. Russell's cutting back and forth between parallel scenes of Dicky on the prison phone with mother while Mickey battles a powerful Mexican opponent. It's like cage match dancing.
The fights are not just physical. The family and girlfriend fight for Mickey's allegiance. A new manager pits Dicky against his brother. Which ties will be stronger: the anguish of the family or the tempting opportunities? The low ebb between the brothers comes when Christian Bale, desperate to compete with an outside offer to pay for training for Mickey, pimps out his girlfriend and gets into a fight with the cops. Mickey hears the commotion and runs to intervene, only to have his right hand crushed by an overly zealous policeman.
An HBO movie-within-a-movie ties the characters and the action even more tightly. Bale (and the viewer) believe the documentary is about his knockout of Sugar Ray Leonard when it is actually about his downfall due to crack addiction. As Bale watches the documentary in the prison auditorium surrounded by fellow inmates, Russell cuts to Wahlberg desperately calling his ex-wife to ask her not to let their daughter watch it. She gleefully refuses, telling him she want her to know what kind of man he is. In another scene the bleary eyed mother shoos Bale's little son away so he can't watch it. When Christian Bale suddenly realizes that he is the subject as the crack addict as we hear the filmmaker within the film say Bale will end up in either the cemetery and prison. Cut to Bale's face behind bars.
The fights are taut and visceral. You can feel the body blows and get into the clinches. It all leads up to the climax which reveals the true nature of the brothers' ties
The cast, especially Bale who seems to do his own stunts jumping out of a second story window several times, are great. Amy Adams plays Wahlberg's love interest, a salty tongued college-educated bartender who is one of the very few characters who is not afraid of mother. She can give as good as she gets and doesn't take guff from anyone. She's also great-looking.
Wahlberg is terrific with intelligence, torment and restraint written all over his face. He's the rock who's shuffled aside by the mother's fantasies of Dicky's comeback and bears gamely under his ex-wife's abuse and his family's manipulations. I read that he trained for three years to get into shape for the movie and it shows.
Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson wrote the screenplay, which sounds authentically working class Lowell.