The Fighter
2010
(Comments only. The film clip is in
yesterday's edition.)
Micky
Ward is one of the very few truly famous people who could be considered a
bit player in his own biography. Ward was a hard-punching light welterweight
from a blue collar Irish-American family in Massachusetts. He once earned the
WBU belt with a dramatic TKO over the formerly undefeated Shea Neary, and his
story is a good yarn. In the first part of his career, his
mother was his manager and his older brother was his trainer, but he got fed
up with his family's mismanagement of his career. After he had gone through a
slump, some bad match-ups, and some injuries, he decided to quit boxing at age
26. Some two and a half years later, he decided to make a comeback with new
management. He won his first nine comeback fights, knocked out a formerly
undefeated contender (Alfonso Sanchez),
got some title shots,
and ultimately won the WBU title from Neary. Three of his later fights were
picked as the "Fight of the Year" by The Ring magazine at the beginning of the
millennium.
But this film is not really about him. Micky himself was and is
soft-spoken, shy, and sensible. He didn't say or do anything very colorful,
and was not very interesting cinematic subject, despite his amazing
career. He was just a dull, hard-working guy who took his job seriously, like
most of us who will never have movies made about our lives. His job just
happened to be beating the crap out of other guys. If it's not a conventional biography of Micky, it's not really a boxing film either, even though it follows all the
same plot points as every fictional fight movie you've ever seen. If it were a
film for fans of the so-called sweet science, it would have ended with the
three spectacularly sour and unscientific bloodbaths he fought against Arturo
Gatti. The two sluggers specialized in taking punishment as well as they could
dish it out, and they made a habit of sending each other to the hospital.
Their first battle, won by Ward,
is often cited as the
greatest ever, but this alleged boxing film never even mentions the
alleged greatest boxing match of all time, and that fact will tell you that
The Fighter is not the kind of film that requires a love for, or even any
knowledge about, boxing. The minimum standard to enjoy the film is a mere
tolerance for boxing. The film never even mentions the legendary Gatti fights,
and its not one of those films where you are meant to feel the punches from
the audience. The fight scenes in the film are actually quite tame by modern
standards.
The real core of the film is the personal and professional relationship
between Ward and his fimily, particularly his older brother, the welterweight
Dicky Eklund. Dicky had once been considered the star boxer of the family, and
had even achieved a modicum of national fame when he
floored Sugar Ray Leonard
before losing a unanimous decision. Dicky was not the same kind of fighter as
Micky. Far leaner than his compact brother, he could never match his sibling's
punching power. Only 13% of Dicky's fights ended with victorious KOs, compared
to 53% for Micky. But Dicky was fairly effective as an Ali-style fighter, a
guy who would dance longer and faster than his opponent, and he employed that
style well enough to go the distance with some very tough opponents, including
Leonard, Dave Green and Erkki Meronen. (Green was the European champion at one
time, and Merronen was 37-1 at one point in his career.)
Eklund had fallen on hard times by the time of his brother's first
retirement. Although he was supposed to be training his brother, he had
gotten addicted to crack, had become undependable, and had even become a
hard-core criminal. Eklund's fall from glory was the subject of a major HBO
documentary,
High on Crack Street: Lost Lives in Lowell. Dicky's incarceration was
the back-breaking straw which ultimately pushed his brother into his first
retirement. Unlike his taciturn younger brother, Dicky was very cinematic
indeed. He spoke in his own form of Yogisms, and was lively, charismatic and
cocky. Although brother Micky's personal life was mundane and essentially
uncinematic, Dicky's was the polar opposite, a crime film waiting for a
camera.
And a conviction.
While Dickys' jail sentence had originally seemed like the end of the world
to him and his family, it actually saved his life. With his body and mind
force-freed from the debilitating impact of crack, he was able to recover his
health and his sanity in prison, and emerged from the experience chastened and
straight. As the result of some tricky family negotiations, Dicky eventually
re-entered his brother's career, and the two were genuine partners in Micky's
subsequent success.
As you might expect, the contrasting styles of the real-life brothers drew
radically different actors to play them. The most difficult part of playing
Micky was capturing what he did in the ring, and the athletic Mark Wahlberg,
who looks like a fighter to begin with, did everything necessary to be as
convincing as he needed to be. On the other hand, the family drama didn't
center on the quiet, unassuming Micky, so Marky Mark didn't even have to break
a sweat to embody Micky. He basically just played Mark Wahlberg, and that
happened to fit
perfectly. The film's real casting challenge was to find someone to capture
the wild and eccentric motormouth that was Dick Eklund. Matt Damon was
originally reported to have been cast in the role, and I like Matt's
performances very much, but I can't imagine that he could have altered his own
personality enough to play the free-spirited Dicky. The role finally went to
the obsessive method actor Christian Bale, who went to his usual outlandish
lengths to capture every nuance of Eklund's personality and appearance, right
down to the bad teeth and bald spot. Although Bale normally weighs around 190
pounds, he
(almost)
shrunk himself down to welterweight size for this role, and also managed to
master Dicky's accent and mannerisms. He even trained at Dicky's own gym in
preparation for the fight, and kept right at it after the film was lensed,
when he was trying to gain his weight back. Bale's hard work paid off with an
astounding and memorable performance which seems certain to earn him an Oscar
nomination, and perhaps the award itself.
By the way, Matt Damon wasn't the only famous name to be attached to the
film in the past. Before landing the current director, David O. Russell,
actor-producer Mark Wahlberg pitched the project to Martin Scorsese, who took
a pass, and Darren Aronofsky, who accepted the director's chair then later
withdrew, but kept a foot in the door as an executive producer.
It's not a very thoughtful film, but it's an engrossing and entertaining film to watch
because it has a solid story populated by colorful characters, all of which
are played by top actors.
Bale and the other three stars of the film all earned deserved Golden Globe
nominations. That group includes Wahlberg, Mellissa Leo as the brothers' stage
mother, and Amy Adams as Micky's future wife, a confrontational outsider who
finds herself unable to get accepted within the brothers' family clique.
Setting aside the fine performances, the script itself
passes the Scoopy Prime Directive for biopics, in that it would still be
fascinating even if it were entirely fictional. By choosing the right elements
to include and exclude in the narrative, the screenwriters were able to use
the unaltered facts to create a biography which plays out like a conventional,
old-fashioned "underdog triumphs" boxing movie, while at the same time
creating a vivid, realistic, and colorful family drama which requires no real
interest in boxing at all.
And it's all the more involving because it really happened.
IMDb: 8.4/10.
That is currently #6 among the 2010 films, which means it is ahead of such
darlings as True Grit and The Social Network.
Rotten Tomatoes: 88% positive reviews.
Metacritic: 78/100
Golden Globes: six nominations, including best director and best drama
The National Board of Review chose Christian Bale as the year's best
supporting actor.
Roger Ebert: awarded only two and a half stars out of four.
He was really in the minority on this one. He said: "The weakness of the
film is the weakness of the leading role. That's not a criticism pf Mark
Wahlberg, who has a quite capable range, but of how he and Russell see the
character. Micky comes across as a proud, not very bright, very determined man
who has apparently never given his family much constructive thought. To say of
your family, "they're my family!" is true enough, but may not be sufficiently
analytical. His love for Charlene is real, but he never quite realizes he
really must choose between her vision and his mother's. His character remains
strangely unfocused."
James Berardinelli: three stars out of four
Box Office: not a major hit, but an absolute success. It opened in the #4
position during the week before Christmas and has already grossed $46 million
from a modest production budget of $25 million.
The Amy Adams "nude" scene (actually a transparent bra) is to be found in
yesterday's page. We will keep an eye out for HD versions.