If you took one of Ben Affleck’s Massachusetts exploitation films, rolled it around in some dirt, and beat some dents in it with a bat, you’d probably end up with something like The Fighter. Working class environments, weathered faces, and sweat stains are the name of the game for director David O. Russell’s latest. I thought Affleck’s vision of Boston’s more calloused neighborhoods was pretty borderline on how much it exaggerated and made a fetish of the working class of New England and their white-trashy lives, but what O. Russell does here with Lowell trumps even that. Through the lens of his camera, Massachusetts is pretty much the worst place on the planet, all crack houses, ugly people, and grating accents. Even Amy Adams, an actress who is usually presented as radiant and angelic, is sporting a couple of extra pounds around the mid section and squeezed into too small cutoff shorts and a belly shirt when her character is introduced. Is nothing sacred? However, while the location scouting, production design, and casting were all pointedly trying to achieve a down to Earth look for the film, O Russell’s camera presents things in a less utilitarian way than you might imagine. I pictured this being all handheld and close-ups, throwing you into the action and making you a part of it, and there is some of that; but this world is also presented in a much more stylistic and flourish filled way than that. The difference between this and most working class indies is apparent from the very first few scenes on. This isn’t a guerilla film made with no budget or permits. You’re watching something with big time actors that has been made by a unique, talented filmmaker who is more than willing to experiment.
All of the talk coming out of this one is likely to be about Christian Bale’s performance. He gets the showiest role of the film and turns in what is probably the most animated performance of his career. His jittery, motor-mouthed portrayal of Dicky Eklund overpowers all of the other actors on the screen. This might be pointed to as a negative of Bale’s performance, but it seems like this is the same effect that the real Dicky has on the people in his life. At points his rambling showmanship borderlines on parroting of Donal Logue’s character Jimmy the Cab Driver, at other times he shoots for the over the top grandiosity of Daniel Plainview, still others I got a bit of the cocky, growling strut of late career Pacino. Wahlberg shrinks in his presence. How much of this was by design and how much of it is the result of Bale chewing up and spitting out his costars is up for debate, but the effect is a serious downplaying of Mickey’s journey; which was supposed to be the lead story of the film. Melissa Leo is able to muster up few moments of real humanity as the mother. The evil way that she very openly prefers one of her sons to the other is too much to forgive. On paper she is written as a contemptible shrew, and instead of tempering that by playing the material with vulnerability or hinting at past traumas that might inform her motivations, Leo embraces the villainous nature of her character and plays everything with contempt and a self-important smugness. I think a more complex portrayal of the mother could have helped this story from dipping into evil stepmother, Disney movie territory; a place that it unfortunately goes. By the time Mickey is presented with the decision of being loyal to his family or continuing on his own path there isn’t even a little part of you that doesn’t want him to throw these people off of a cliff. Amy Adams gives the most consistent performance of the film as the girlfriend. Bale mixes a couple of strong dramatic moments with some over acted hammy ones, but I bought Adams every time she was on screen. Even when she was getting into hood fights with her boyfriend’s sisters and yelling endless strings of curse words through her front door everything she did felt grounded and real, a tone that this film sometimes hit, but was never able to maintain.
Though I thought Adams did an admirable job holding together her character as a cohesive whole, I had problems with the way she was written. Charlene is never really portrayed as a real person with her own thoughts and struggles. She is the angel that enters Mickey’s life just when he needs it, supports him unconditionally for really no reason, and is just the kind of person he needs in his life to stand up to his family. Here she is, a girl who is heavily sought after by pretty much every man in the town, and she immediately latches on to Mickey with no effort on his part. He fumbles his chance at hitting on her, but she guides him through it. He stands her up on their first date due to insecurity, but she tracks him down and makes him do things the right way anyways. Even when they finally go out he takes her to a boring art film in a different town because he doesn’t want to be seen in public, but she takes this in stride. Before we can see what she sees in Mickey, or even have her explain it to us, we jump ahead several weeks to them being a permanent and committed couple. Their relationship is the first new development in Mickey’s life that we get and it’s completely glossed over. It feels very much like they had to include the relationship to get Mickey to the place they need him to be by the end of the film, but they didn’t want to be bothered with writing the courtship.
In addition to Leo’s portrayal of Alice there are several other instances of characters that never are able to develop past being caricatures. The way that Mickey’s seven sisters are portrayed is completely cartoonish and over the top. They are one part the witches from Macbeth, one part the evil stepsisters from Cinderella, one part open casting call looking for ugly women. They are never shown to be individuals, just extensions of their mother. Not unlike Dr. Octopus’ tentacles. There isn’t anything intrinsically wrong with this sort of portrayal, but when it’s part of a film that tries to be a gritty, street level drama as often as it does a fanciful Cinderella story, things can unravel pretty easily. Wahlberg’s character also has a young daughter that shows up for about 30 seconds of screen time, yet is able to muster up melodrama so extreme in those 30 seconds that the writing of her character should get some sort of bad screenwriting award. It’s a lot of screaming, and horrible parenting, and won’t they think of the children. The fact that she has no bearing on the story told, nor is ever really mentioned other than those 30 seconds that she is on screen is baffling. Her character should have been cut completely, but seems to have been haphazardly inserted into the script for no reason other than maintaining authenticity to the facts of Ward’s life. These are the pitfalls of basing films on “true stories”.
The music of this film worked to further my confusion of what it was and what it was trying to be. The original score is very modern and minimal. It reminded me of the work that Kevin Shields did on Lost in Translation and fit the half of this movie that was gritty street drama perfectly. The pop songs that were included in the soundtrack were all bombastic, masculine, dad rock. They felt like just the sort of thing that would be included in an inspirational sports film aimed at Middle America. For a film coming from a director who’s known for his artistic flourishes and is being released at the height of awards movie season, none of it fit for me at all. This soundtrack begged for hipper choices. By the time we get to the big fight at the end and Mickey comes to the ring accompanied by and singing along with Whitesnake’s ‘Here I Go Again’, things had gotten completely laughable. Didn’t Will Ferrell already use this song for laughs in Old School by effectively showing how faux badass and out of touch it was? To see a character that I’m supposed to be getting behind and supporting doing the same thing, but with a straight face and earnestness, just made me feel sad for him. Oh Mickey Ward, you’re such a lame Prole. The film’s left of center look and score were constantly at odds with its other more grasping, mainstream elements.
Which direction is The Fighter going to go? Is it going to be a family drama about drug addiction, disappointment, and the limits of loyalty, is it going to be an inspirational sports story about coming from the bottom and rising to the top, or is it going to be a dark comedy about a put upon son and his overbearing family? Nobody seems to know, and it affects everything. The pacing of the film is probably what suffers the most. After a long stretch of time watching the Ward/Eklund/however many last names they have family behave as nothing other than stupid, hateful, hillbillies I found myself unable to root for anyone; and I just started to get bored. The first act is extended beyond it’s welcome. We spend so much time with Dicky as he messes up, Alice as she lacks empathy, and Mickey as he refuses to stand up for himself and take control of his life’s direction that the film had almost lost me by the time it starts to make the turn. When I was feeling the most annoyed there was a very apparent walk out in my theater. For most of the film we wallow in mediocrity. It’s only after Dicky gets thrown in jail that the plot gets any forward motion, and it’s only when Dicky gets out of jail that there is any sort of interesting conflict. The Fighter never completely lost me though. Right when I was able to give up on it for good, and a couple minutes after one couple in my theater did, things picked up with a brawl between Charlene and Mickey’s sisters. It was a fun moment that finally showed somebody fighting back against stupidity and self-destruction. For a film called The Fighter, the change was very welcome.
Mickey’s rise to the top is handled mostly in montage form. Dicky goes away, Mickey replaces Alice as his manager, and then we get some thrown together sequences of working out and winning fights. It’s not too long after this that we reach the point of Dicky getting out of jail and him and Alice expecting everything to go back to the way it was. I would have liked a bit more time to get used to Mickey’s life going well. It would have made the return of his ne’er do well brother have more impact and intrigue. It felt to me like the filmmakers were afraid to put too much of the attention on Wahlberg and were always itching to get back to that emaciated, Oscar baiting, Christian Bale performance. If that is the case, then this should have been a film about Dicky Eklund, not Mickey Ward. As is, this film needed to trim about twenty minutes off of it’s “Dicky is an incorrigible scamp” time and redirect it towards Mickey’s story. How did his life change for the better when he was away from his family? How does he maintain his focus now that they are back in his life? Can he be both a family man and a success? These are the questions at the heart of this story; but the focus is all on Dicky. And still, by the time we get to the big fight climax of the film, I found myself affected by the moment. The Fighter took a couple of wrong turns along the way, it showed me a lot of stuff that I didn’t buy, but by the time we reached our destination I was still with it. I cared whether or not Mickey would be able to win the title. I worried that Dicky was going to find a way to screw it all up for him again. This is a film that is wildly uneven, but not completely ineffective. Probably it was the artistry of the camera work, the joy of watching Bale throw himself into a role, and the effective way that Wahlberg is able to play the sad puppy that kept things afloat. Still, I would have rather seen either a hard hitting indie film about Dicky’s fall from grace or a sappy, fairy tale rendition of Mickey’s rise from poverty and adversity to the world title instead of the confused mishmash that we got here.
