The Fighter (2010)

With The Fighter, Mark Wahlberg joins the ranks of Errol Flynn, James Earl Jones, Sylvester Stallone, and Hilary Swank as an underdog fighter who overcomes long odds and insurmountable personal circumstances to achieve pugilistic (and I’m sure he hopes awards-season) success. Unfortunately, this latest film in the genre neither floats like a butterfly nor stings like a bee.

Wahlberg stars as “Irish” Micky Ward, a junior welterweight fighter from the poverty-stricken, blighted town of Lowell, Massachusetts. Micky is training to be the new pride of Lowell, a title still being touted by his older half-brother, Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale). Since his heyday when he knocked down Sugar Ray Leonard, Dicky has become an unreliable, crack-addicted albatross around the neck of his entire family. Not that the boys’ overbearing, foul-mouthed mom/manager, Alice (Melissa Leo), will ever admit that. She and her gaggle of seven daughters enable Dicky’s habit, while simultaneously holding poor codependent Micky back.

But a series of bad fights set up by Alice and Dicky, who are more concerned with the purse than they are with Micky’s career, and a new romance with a sweet-but-tough bartender named Charlene (Amy Adams) force Micky to rethink his allegiances. The turning point comes when Dicky is convicted and sent to jail, and Micky’s newfound freedom from his brother’s shadow allows him to start a serious climb to the top.

Like many of its kind, The Fighter is based on the story of a real-life unlikely sports hero with conflict in his corner. Penned by Scott Silver, Paul Tamasay, and Eric Johnson, the film also takes advantage of a connection to Bean Town, which in recent years has come to represent the epitome of working class life.

When I say takes advantage of, I mean just that. David O. Russell’s directing of the story comes complete with tons of cheap jokes at the expense of the fighter’s “poo-ah Bahstin” friends and neighbors. Big hair, fake nails, acid-wash jeans and dubious family relations are all fodder for the white-trash laugh machine. At one point, a documentary film crew lingers on the story of Alice’s nine children and their three different fathers, two of which I believe are brothers. The scene is played as comedy (like another superfluous scene where a ring girl trips and falls flat onto the mat when the bell rings) instead of used to display the tangled web of dependencies that nearly kills Micky’s career.

These moments of exploitive humor don’t just offend; they also make it impossible for you to root for Dicky’s redemption or Micky’s championship belt. Russell’s constant jokey interruptions and too tightly zoomed handheld camerawork keep audiences at arm’s length and prevent them from being drawn into the lives of these people. It’s the difference between documentary, which this year’s other Boston-set drama The Town often feels like, and crude, tacky peep show.

Moreover, The Fighter, which drags on and on through its 115-minute run time, is one of the worst paced films I’ve ever seen. It is unfocused and chaotic, lumbering from one scene to the next with little narrative or visual continuity. It’s as though the film’s editor was the one who took too many jabs to the head. The filming is at its worst when it switches to mimic the grainy, jerky style employed by HBO in televised bouts–a stupid, gimmicky choice that adds nothing to the story. If Russell wanted to set his tale apart from other boxing biopics, this was a terrible way to do it.

Also pretty deplorable was the acting by most of The Fighter’s non-marquee stars. So stilted and wooden were all of these performances that I left the theater convinced that Russell had picked up real-life crackheads off the streets to play them in the film. And I actually had to double-check IMDB to see if any of the harpy sisters had ever worked as actors before. They have. But I’m not sure if any of them should work again. Okay, maybe they can be in a Nicholas Cage movie or something.

All this bad acting makes it impossible to know what to do with Bale’s Stanislavskyian excesses. Having dropped down to what looks like his cadaverous weight in The Machinist, he throws himself into this role with the kind of method-acting passion that certainly deserves a better film than he’s in. Wahlberg, at least, is able to match Bale’s manic intensity with his own quiet, brooding sort. And Adams holds her own in her handful of scenes where she faces off with the boys’ cartoonishly shrill mother and sisters. Oddly, the lone non-actor, Mickey O’Keefe who plays himself as Micky’s trainer, isn’t half bad. Still, these fine performances are all but lost in the shuffle of so much directorial detritus.

It’s too bad. In the hands of a director with a little more heart and a little less interest in freak shows, The Fighter coulda been a contender.