‘The Fighter’ less about boxing and more about family ties
When I told a friend I was seeing
”
The Fighter
”
this weekend and he asked what it was about, I said it was the
boxing movie. When I said that, he knew which movie I meant. But
even before I sat down to watch it in a full theater Friday night,
I knew it would be about much more than boxing.
‘The Fighter’ less about boxing and more about family ties
When I told a friend I was seeing “The Fighter” this weekend and he asked what it was about, I said it was the boxing movie. When I said that, he knew which movie I meant. But even before I sat down to watch it in a full theater Friday night, I knew it would be about much more than boxing.
The movie chronicles the climb of boxer Micky Ward from stepping stone to welterweight champion of the world. But more than that, it portrays his struggles dealing with a manipulative mother and a crank-addicted brother. The movie is serious stuff, and there has been plenty of Oscar buzz around it, some of it warranted.
Mark Wahlberg, who initially started out in the shadow of a more famous older brother much like Ward, is a fine actor and he is perfect for the role of a working-class Massachusetts Irish-American boxer. Micky Ward’s older brother and trainer, Dicky Ecklund, is played by Christian Bale who is fantastic at transforming himself for roles. And that transformation goes beyond just the weight he gains and loses for different movies, from adding pounds of muscle to play Batman to looking like he’s on the brink of starvation in “Rescue Dawn.” Bale takes on the mannerism, the movements and the speech patterns of the characters he portrays in a way that few actors can achieve. Bale takes only seconds to let people know that Dicky Ecklund is a drug addict, long before viewers ever see him taking a hit off a crack pipe.
Micky is a 31-year-old working class guy who has looked up to his older half brother Dicky Ecklund most of his life. Ecklund’s claim to fame is that he once knocked out Sugar Ray Leonard in the ring – though some people dispute how much the knock out had to do with his boxing style and how much of it should be credited to a slip by Leonard.
In the opening of the film, set in 1993, an HBO film crew is following Ecklund around town. He tells everyone the movie is about his comeback. But when he is supposed to show up to train his brother – and so the documentary film crew can videotape more of him – he loses track of time when he is hanging out in a crack house.
Micky has had a rough string of fights, which he has lost, and he is getting a reputation as a stepping stone. His brother and his mother Alice Ward (Charlene Fleming), who serves as his manager, have set up a fight for him in Atlantic City that they swear will be his big shot to turn his losing streak around. But when he arrives for the fight, the person he is supposed to box against has the flu. The promoters offer him a chance to fight another guy who is “just off the couch,” as he has just gotten out of prison. The fighter has 20 pounds on Micky and is technically in another weight class. But Micky is reminded that if he doesn’t fight, no one gets paid. His mother and brother reassure him that he can take on the bigger fighter – but in the end he can’t and he ends up beaten badly.
Other players in the movie include George Ward (Jack McGee,) Micky’s father and father to some of his eight siblings as well as Mickey O’Keefe (who played himself in the film), who is the more reliable of Micky’s trainers. Micky also has seven sisters who serve as a sort of peanut gallery. The sisters, all adults, appear to be living with their mother and come across as one-dimensional. Perhaps the filmmakers felt overwhelmed with giving so many siblings too much depth so the sisters serve mostly just to antagonize Micky’s new girlfriend Charlene (Amy Adams.) The result is that the movie slips into a cartoonish realm every time the sisters are onscreen and distracts from the rest of the story.
Charlene works in a bar, but she did go to college (though she dropped out) so his sisters assume she thinks she is better than the family. But mostly Charlene tries to persuade Micky to distance himself from his mother and his brother, who she sees as manipulating his career for their short-term payoff rather than thinking about his future.
Wahlberg is good in a quiet way as Micky, who tries to figure out how to do what is best for himself as he struggles with the loyalty he feels for a family that hasn’t ever had his best interest in mind. He also transformed physically into the boxer he needed to be in the film. The boxing scenes are few and far between in the beginning of the movie, and with Dicky’s drug addiction and Alice Ward’s anger, the boxing scenes are actually the least exciting scenes in the film. The director and filmmakers slipped a little too far over the edge into melodrama in some of those scenes, which makes me think the movie is not likely to take any of the big Oscar awards. Bale and Wahlberg, however, deserve consideration for their performances.
Melissa Flores can be reached at [email protected]. She writes a blog at http://melissa-movielines.blogspot.com, where she writes about movies, TV and more.
