The Fighter Review

“The Fighter” is really a working-class family drama thinly disguised as a sports movie.

In fact, other than the way director David O. Russell recreated the 1990’s HBO look for the fight scenes (a sneakily cool effect), the boxing aspects of “The Fighter” are arguably its weakest points. (The fights are rousing by nature, but there’s simply nothing special — one way or the other — about the way Russell stages them.)

Fortunately, that doesn’t come close to preventing “The Fighter” from being one of the better movies of the year.

“The Fighter” is ostensibly the story of “Irish” Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) a welterweight boxer from Lowell, Massachusetts looking to rejuvenate his career with help from the same family that continues to derail it. However, “The Fighter” turns out to be just as much about Micky’s older half brother Dicky Eklund (newly-minted Oscar nominee Christian Bale), a former boxer and current crack addict when we meet him in the movie.

It doesn’t take long to realize that “The Fighter” is really about each man’s attempts to pick themselves up and make something of their lives, and how they need each other to do so. Fortunately, they have plenty of additional support.

Oscar nominee Melissa Leo is excellent as Alice Ward, Micky’s mom and manager (mom-ager?) and Dicky’s #1 apologist. Leo manages to shine though some truly garish makeup and costumes, while also grounding Alice and making her believable. It makes complete sense to me that she would devote more time and resources to Dicky — even at the expense of Micky — simply because Dicky is the son that needs the most help.

As great as Leo is, I’m even a bigger fan of fellow Oscar nominee Amy Adams as Charlene, the tough, spirited woman who inspires Micky’s comeback. Adams “uglifies” herself for the role — which really means she looks like a normal person — and is convincingly grungy, especially for someone who has literally played a Disney princess.

My favorite part of her performance — besides inspiring my new favorite insult: “MTV Girl” — is that she’s not the typical wet blanket girlfriend we get in this type of movie. She’s not perfect and, like everyone else in the movie, she’s not thrilled with the way her life has turned out, but she’s 100% there to support her partner.

And that partner is played unassumingly well by Wahlberg. He obviously doesn’t have the showiest role in the movie, but Wahlberg has Micky walk around like his carrying around the weight of his family and his hometown’s expectations on his shoulders.

Of course, as you’ve probably heard, the movie belongs to Christian Bale.

The best way I can think to put it is that if it were possible for a human being to play a train wreck, than Christian Bale just nailed it. His Dicky Eklund is a human train wreck. The real kicker is that even as Dicky sabotages his life and the lives of those around him, he STILL manages to be unbelievably charismatic. It’s a wonder to watch Bale cut loose after playing the more understated role and ceding the spotlight to co-stars like Heath Ledger, Russell Crowe, Johnny Deep and Sam Worthington in recent years.

The cast is obviously the best thing about “The Fighter,” but they get a big-time assist from Russell. Just because I wasn’t a big fan of his staging of the boxing scenes doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate the way allowed his actors to naturally and effortlessly relate to each other.

I’m also a big fan of the way he (like Ben Affleck with “The Town”) made a particular corner of Massachusetts a character in the movie. The main characters may be played by glamorous movie stars, but almost everyone else in the movie (the locals, the actresses who played Micky and Dicky’s sisters) looked like they wandered onto the set on their way to a bar. (Or, should I say, on their way to a “bah.”)

“The Fighter” works because it tells a timeless story of redemption and struggle, but it does so through a pretty specific prism. It also helps to have great actors working at the top of their games.

The Fighter…B+