Review of The Fighter (2010) by Shiira — 27 Dec 2010

Exactly how uneducated and emotionally stunted are the fighter's seven sisters, the hairspray-addled girls who give Charlene(Amy Adams), a barmaid, such a hard time? Very uneducated. Very, very stunted.

That's how much. Concerning adulthood, the "girls" put to mind that old adage, "they know the words, but not the music". Set in 1993, the Ecklund sisters, some of them clearly pushing forty(Asian women age better), are like eternal teenagers, catty and fiercely cliquish, under the watchful eye of a domineering mother, so eighties, it hurts just looking at them.

That Alice(Melissa Leo), she's a real piece of work. Her kids are all messed up. The movie's use of Whitesnake's "Here I Go Again" suggests that Nirvana never made it to Lowell, Massachusetts.

While it's the brothers who know how to take and deliver a punch, the sisters seem to be the ones who ended up punch-drunk. To them, a college...dropout, not a graduate, mind you, is cause for class warfare.

Any man alive, let alone a woman, has to be brave to enter the Ecklund household; enter the fighter's girlfriend, a former URI high-jumper, categorically dismissed as that "MTV girl", a woman deemed by the "white trash" Greek chorus to be something akin to a fleshy hood ornament on David Coverdale's car, weathers the name-calling and wouldn't be faulted if she chose to fight fire with fire, by pointing out the elephant in the room that Dickie(Christian Bale) brings into the open during the film's most telling scene.

Tired of living in his brother's shadow, Micky finally summons up enough intestinal fortitude to set his vampiric family straight, when the aging pugilist announces his plans to tarin year-round in Las Vegas, while Charlene sits not-so-quietly on the couch, lending moral support throughout this long-overdue ostracization process.

The wisdom of the move, of course, is challenged. First, by Alice, who resorts to emotional blackmail so transparent, a panel of judges, if there was one present, would have awarded the fight to Micky, by unanimous decision, and then by a brother whose rhetoric functions like punches that never land.

Swing and miss, swing and miss goes Dicky(whose claim to fame was a moral victory over middleweight boxing legend Sugar Ray Leonard...almost fourteen years ago), and his mouth, spouting out the pros of staying home to train, just like he did in his prime, without a trace of self-awareness about the ramifications that this tragic decision entailed.

Because Dicky remained staunchly local, and surrounded himself with the dope fiends of this working class borough(he's known as "The Pride of Lowell"), he helped contribute to his own demise, succumbing like he did, to the crackheads and the prevailing milieu of social and economical decay.

He had help, of course, but nobody has the heart, not even Charlene who claims to hate him, least of all, the fighter's father(henpecked to death by Alice) and the fighter himself, to lay bare the facts about this almost famous fighter's life since his brief taste of fleeting fame.

"The Fighter" doesn't spell it out for moviegoers, but everybody can plainly see how the matriarch's sick promotion of familial tribalism(it's sick because Alice is willing to repeat the same mistakes with Micky) led to he favorite son's downward spiral, not to mention, the smaller roundabout southbound spirals of her cartoonish sisters.

Speaking of cartoons, that's what the multiple incidents at the neighborhood crack house resemble, a Warner Brothers short, in which the mother and first-born son take on the personas of the Road Runner(she's fast, beep-beep, nine kids) and Wile E.

Coyote. (Dicky has a friend he calls "Boo-Boo", which makes him Yogi Bear, I guess.) Like the feral dog, the crackhead constantly finds himself in the same fatalistic predicament; he's falling down from a high place, a "cliff"(an open window), that ends with a thud(instead of the canyon floor's hard surface, he lands on a bed of garbage bags), in which he miraculously walks away from with nary a scratch.

The coyote nearly kills the lightning-fast bird. Likewise, it's what Dicky does to his mother each time she surprises him at his drug den, that is, until Alice's compartmentalizing skills takes on a life of its own, by which she compartmentalizes the truth away.

So Micky stays east-side, and eventually breaks away from his Looney Tunes family, but it's only temporary, since the whole clan is back in the fold before Ward's title bout with Englishman Shea Neary.

As a result, Micky's victory feels somewhat tempered by Dicky's all-consuming hunger for recognition, co-opting his brother's success into his own, by feeding on the championship boxer's afterglow. True to form, during the post-script, some doc footage shows Ward struggling to get a word in edgewise from his showboating older brother, trying to steal the movie, and perhaps, succeeding.