Fighting Points of View KOs THE FIGHTER

Withdrawal can be a bitch to deal with.

This is Bennett, taking a break from kidnapping John Matrix's daughter.

I recently caught the much-hyped film, The Fighter, the true story of down-and-out boxer Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg), his family, and his rise to the top. Much has been made about Wahlberg’s and his two co-stars’ performances: Amy Adams as Charlene, Ward’s love interest, and scene stealer Christian Bale as Ward’s older half-brother Dicky Eklund. All the accolades they have coming to them are well deserved. All the hype surrounding this film? Not so much.



While it’s not a bad film, it’s ultimately a forgettable one. At its core, it’s trying to do too much. Take, for instance, the film’s description in its Wikipedia entry:

As a welterweight from the wrong side of the tracks, Irish-American Dicky Eklund is the pride of working class Lowell, Massachusetts. Living in his shadow is his half-brother and sparring partner Micky Ward. After fighting Sugar Ray Leonard, Eklund plunges into a nightmare of crack addiction, violence and prison. His family's hopes are crushed in the wake of Dicky's decline. Like a real life Rocky, Micky fights on his own terms and pulls his family out of despair with his meteoric rise in the ring. Freshly paroled Dicky finds redemption training his little brother, now known as "Irish" Micky Ward, for his Welterweight Championship bout with Shea Neary.

How many freakin’ storylines do we have to explore here? Working class fighter, family going to hell, brother going to prison, rising up from the crap, blah blah blah. There’s just too much going on. Who’s the main character even? Because Micky Ward is supposed to be the guy. Do you get that impression after reading the description? Nope, me neither. And it’s just as confusing when you watch the movie. I understand stories that try to run parallel characters and whatnot, but you can’t do it here. Dicky Eklund is too ‘big’ of a character—he’s too large, too loud, too in-your-face, while Ward is too subdued, simmering, subtle. Opposites? Sure, but there has to be a balance in delivery. And the compelling stuff is with Dicky, who’s the supporting character. We barely even know who Ward is by the credits. If Ward is the intended main character, then we need to focus more on him, and not as much on Dicky, who would be much better in smaller doses. It’s too much of a challenge to have the audience follow a character that is as ‘out there’ as Dicky is—it just doesn’t work. We need a Luke Skywalker character to follow, or a Kevin Costner-type of Everyman, and that’s Micky. That’s the problem with this film: there’s not a strong enough central focus. We go from HBO filming a special on Dicky, to the fall and splintering of the Ward family, to a championship shot. It comes off as uneven, unfinished, and ultimately unfulfilled, because there are some great, great bits in here.

For instance, the acting is fantastic. Amy Adams, where have you been all this time? Talk about successfully breaking out of character. She absolutely nails her performance as the strong-willed love interest who puts everything she has into building Ward up. And you can feel her need to help Ward break away from his family, and she does it so seamlessly that I actually forgot I was watching Amy Adams, if that makes any sense. Mark Wahlberg, whose career seems to be based on playing nice, subdued guys (minus his work in The Departed), returns with the same amount of gusto he brings to all his other nice, subdued characters. Except there’s a simmering rage under the surface this time, and it comes out here and there, but there isn’t enough material to explore that; instead, the filmmakers opted to go the less-subtle route and use Dicky for the external manifestations of the internalized tensions. It just feels uneven because Micky isn’t well-rounded enough compared to Bale’s Eklund.

Bale’s portrayal of Eklund is astonishing at times. He's a fierce actor and has no qualms about taking challenging roles, and it's kind of cool to watch a guy who clearly takes his craft as seriously as Bale does. I can see him getting an Oscar nod, but I don’t know if the performance, which is a bit too much at times, warrants the win. As I said, he’s a huge character, and Bale really fills his shoes. I read that the director described Eklund as a man with an internal rhythm, someone who doesn’t ‘act’ as much as ‘is,’ and that seems to be captured well by Bale. The problem is there’s too much of him and his addiction, downfall, and what Wikipedia terms his “redemption.” But there’s not enough showing of his redemption—it just seems too easy, too clean, too neat. And it didn’t sit well with me.

There is a moment, when Eklund enters prison, that you think, “Man, this really sucks for them.” It’s a fantastic moment, and it really captures the despair and the frustration that Micky feels. The scene ramps up the tension for the movie, but it comes too soon. This scene catalyzes the rest of the film, motivates the characters and sets everything up, but the rest of the film, frankly, is too cut-and-dry. That is, it’s just too obvious and too simple. I just really wish that the emotional impact came a little later because it kind of ruined the rest of the movie. Or maybe it should have come earlier, and the rest of the movie was more of a struggle. I don’t know. But it seemed out of place and it needed to be manipulated a little more.

So for a film that, at the end of the day, is forgettable, should you watch it? It’s not a bad way to spend your money, but I wouldn’t spend more than a matinee price. Here’s to hoping Amy Adams gets more interesting work.  I guess I'd rather watch this than get impaled by an Austrian-propelled steel pipe.