"The Fighter" (2010)

Dwight Dekeyser rating:  AAA

Dear Friend,

I like boxing.  It’s pure unmitigated violence – nothing pretentious.  Oh, there’s plenty of hype.  But let’s face it, this sport is as basic as it gets: two guys enter the ring and pummel each other until one of them drops.  There is no score for artistry or originality; it’s who can inflict the greatest injury on the opposing party.  The last man standing wins.  This is as close to the Roman coliseum as we ever get in modern times.   Thumbs down meant a lot more than a bad movie review in those days.   Nowadays, we are enlightened.  We allow the vanquished to survive.  The entertainment value may suffer, but our conscious is clear.  What’s a little brain damage amongst washed-out warriors?   “Old boxers never die, they just fade away,” to paraphrase General MacArthur.  This movie is about an aging athlete who would not fade away – not until his self-confidence was restored and his triumph complete.

There have been many wonderful boxing movies throughout the years including Rocky (1976), Raging Bull (1980), Diggstown (1992), Million Dollar Baby (2004), and Cinderella Man (2005).  It’s a theme that appeals to a lot of people.  The effort is superhuman and the result is either triumph or tragedy and sometimes both.  The Fighter is right up there with the best of them.  What is appealing about this picture is that it is the story of a young man, a young couple, brothers, an extended family, a community, and a sport that mixes them together in a combustible cauldron of emotion and action.  The fighting outside the ring was every bit as intense as inside the ring as the family grappled with how best to promote their favorite son in a rough world of brawn, braggadocio, and broken dreams.  As any Roman could tell you, the fight for survival is the most compelling competition of all.

The movie is based on a true story.  Boxing was a family business for this Irish-American clan in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1993: one mother, two fathers, two brothers (both fighters), and seven sisters.  The chain-smoking mother (Melissa Leo) was the fight manager and the crack-addict older brother (Christian Bale) trained the younger brother (Mark Wahlberg).  Sound intense?  It was.  Add a beautiful ambitious girlfriend (Amy Adams) and a chorus of seven jealous sisters and you have one giant dysfunctional family.  Although, most of them lived in one house, no one would mistake their cramped headquarters for the Kennedy compound.  (Touch football?  Ya-gotta-be-kiddin’ me!)  These people were rough and tough.  While their vocabulary was in no way impressive, they had no problem making their opinions known.  Mother to adult daughter: “You talk that way to me in my own kitchen when you owe me $200.00?”  (Mom’s rhetoric was not much better than her promotional abilities.)

What was so refreshing about The Fighter was its down-to-earth quality.  These were blue collar people living in a run down town doing dirty jobs.  No glamor here.  (Bette Davis was born in Lowell, but that was some time ago.)  When the brothers were not training they were working on a road crew or doing a roofing job, sometimes with their sisters.  Boxing was their excitement and their means of social mobility.  Winning in the ring made them important and admired in the community.  It also meant money and a way out of Lowell, a major textile center before it lost its industry to the non-unionized Southern states.  (Remember Norma Rae, 1979?  She’s unemployed now that the textile industry moved to the no-minimum wage Third World.)  The history of Lowell is a parable for our fading country.  In fact, it is the nation’s current economic condition that makes the timeliness of this movie so appropriate.  While it would be tempting to compare this movie to Rocky for its urban ethnic character, it makes one wonder whether The Grapes of Wrath (1940) would not be a more suitable predecessor for a desperate family struggling to survive forces beyond its control.

Not all was struggle and grief.  Much of the movie was funny.  The sisters were a hoot!  (Where did find these actresses – West Virginia?)  The acting was a pure joy to watch.  Melissa Leo and Christian Bale were awesome.  In fact, the casting of the whole movie was flawless.  Mark Wahlberg and Amy Adams were a perfect match.  Local casting added to the authenticity of the picture.  Wahlberg himself is the youngest of nine children from a working-class family in Dorchester, Boston, Massachusetts.  Making appearances as walk-ons were members of the actual Eklund-Ward clan.  Burgess Meredith was unavailable, so they hired Lowell police sergeant and boxing trainer Mikey O’Keefe to portray himself – very convincingly.   The producers couldn’t find anyone locally as debonair as Sugar Ray Leonard or in Hollywood, so they had to hire the real deal for his appearance, “What’s that movie about, again?”

Here’s the trailer: http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi2330986777/

From the Vault:  The Grapes of Wrath (1940).  Directed by John Ford; starring Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell, and John Carradine.  Dust bowl Okies are forced off their land (along with 300,000-400,000 others during the 1930s) and move to “Californie” in a Beverly Hillbillies-style limousine. Jane Darwell gave a heartbreaking performance as Ma Joad and won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.  From the book by John Steinbeck, “The bank is something more than men, I tell you.  It’s the monster.  Men made it, but they can’t control it.”   (Just a little nostalgia for pre-bank regulated America.)

Best of luck in your movie selections.  Your faithful friend,

Dwight Dekeyser

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