I saw The Fighter last night, one of those movies that seems to get a gravitas bump by virtue of being released in December. Slated for wide release on 12/17, it got a week-early exclusive release in Hollywood, all part of the long-ball game known as Awards Season.
Don't get me wrong, it's not a bad movie, but it is being mis-marketed as a boxing movie and one of the lead performances throws the whole thing off-kilter because all the other elements are just so-so.
Directed by David O. Russell (aka "The Shouter," for those who have seen the footage of him and Lily Tomlin going at it on the set of his last movie, 2004's uneven I Heart Huckabees.), The Fighter nominally tells the story of Lowell, MA welterweight Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg), footing the line between contender and 'stepping stone,' between fighter and road paver. Then there's his half-brother, Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale -- another YouTube "shouter"), the Pride of Lowell who's coasting on a long-ago Sugar Ray Leonard bout and a present-day crack habit. Their shared mother is the richly unlikeable Alice Ward, played by Melissa Leo (whom I've loved as an actress since Homicide: Life on the Streets, and is also a regular on David Simon's Treme on HBO). Mom loves, loves, loves her Dicky.
Wahlberg may outweigh him, but it's Bale who score the TKO in this film. It's impossible to take your eyes off Bale, whippet thin (though not as skeletal as in The Machinist), hyper, raised to be a narcissist by their monstrous mother but lacking the self-love to pull it off. (I'd pay money to see a cage-match between Melissa Leo's Alice from The Fighter and Jackie Weaver's Janine Cody from Animal Kingdom. Most destructive movie mom of the year. Go!). The rest of Micky's family consists of his father and seven of the skankiest sisters ever imagined, all with nicknames -- Little Alice, Pork, Tar, Red Dog, Beaver, etc. -- and ratted-out hair. This may be the most pernicious family since Faulkner's Snopes. I wanted Micky to punch ever single one of them. Hard.
It's Bale's performance that stands out, so much so that the rest of the movie can't keep up. Maybe he's tired of grunting behind the Bat-Mask, or pissed that he was blown off the screen by the likes of Sam Worthington in Terminator: Salvation (maybe he was shouting because he saw the dailies?), but it's too much, and when Dicky goes to jail and is removed from the boxing storyline it's the only time any of the other characters/performances have room to breathe.
In the end, the movie itself really seems to be about Dicky. Micky's story, like Micky, seems to just be a punching bag to bring home some box office cash, but Dicky's the golden boy (but who wants to market a movie about a crack addict? Talk about a bummer!). Ryan Gosling earned an Best Actor nomination for his role as a crack-addicted teacher in Half-Nelson (2006), a much more realistic performance than the melodramatics of The Fighter, but I wouldn't be surprised if Christian Bale gets noticed for his more showy, but ultimately lesser, work.
I was thinking of seeing this one. Now I'm on the fence. Loved Bale in American Psycho and Laurel Canyon.
ReplyDeleteFinally saw this last night. Bale's performance reminded me of Sam Jackson's in Jungle Fever. Both were chilling but Bale seemed more nuanced. My favorite scene was when he turns his mom's tears and anger into a smile by singing a Bee Gees song they both love. Perfectly captured his manipulative ways as well as her willingness to turn a blind eye to his addiction. Bale and Leo are world-class actors and anyone, particularly Marky-Mark, would pale by comparison. One question: do you think Dicky was back on the pipe in the last scene with his brother?
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