gmbcorp today: DVD of the Week: The Fighter

DVD of the Week: The Fighter

By Vadim Rizov

Many people have argued The Fighter, now out on DVD, is decent but underwhelming, a get-out-of-jail-semi-free card for a filmmaker in dire need of commercial success. "David O. Russell is wasting his crazy talent on movies like The Fighter," ran a headline for Dan Kois' dispatch during this year's Slate Movie Club. "Is this really the kind of movie we want our David O. Russells directing?" he asked. "Any competent welterweight could punch his way through this story." The answer's ambivalent: do you want pure self-expression, or do you want the classical auteurist game of teasing out a director's personality through a product that initially seems reasonably generic?

The idea that The Fighter is business as usual, helmed a little more vigorously, is a little silly. If The Fighter looks standard-issue, that's only in comparison to Russell's previous confrontational, oft-outre movies. Though technically working from someone else's script ? four credited writers, to be precise ? Russell told Sight & Sound's James Bell that he reworked the film "in a direction that was quite different from what I inherited." The two big changes from formula that got everyone's attention: the Greek chorus of seven sisters that haunt boxer Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) at every turn ? not so much a real group of women as a gaggle of unison-speaking/thinking harridans, acting as overt comic relief ? and the omission of Ward's final fights, his brutal rock-em-sock-em three rounds against Arturo Gatti.

Every single boxing aficionado I knew came out of The Fighter with the same reaction: why omit Ward's career-defining last stand? The answer, presumably, is that Russell really doesn't care: he made a movie about man vs. neighborhood, not man vs. man. Here, it's man vs. family most specifically, a topic in every single Russell film besides Three Kings. Russell may not be Jean Renoir, but his movies don't have true villains (judging by set reports, Russell prefers to play the asshole antagonist himself, albeit offscreen). Instead, they feature people trying to do the right thing while butting up against those who sincerely, if wrongheadedly, believe they're being selfish and self-destructive, most often corrupting voices from within their own family: the dreadful parents of Spanking The Monkey and Flirting With Disaster and Wahlberg's needling wife in I Heart Huckabees, all voices for staying inside the overcrowded nest.

With Wahlberg, Russell's made three movies in which the former Marky Mark transcends his past to become his own personal hero: surviving Three Kings, breaking up his family rather than succumbing to gasoline use in I Heart Huckabees, and here telling mother and sisters, gently, to back off and leave him alone rather than falling into the traditional family industry of self-pity mixed with unearned haughty disapproval of outside. There's a sense of a man acutely conscious of his body's built-in potential for harm and destruction, tamped down.

In The Fighter, unlike his last two films with Russell, Wahlberg finally gets to do some damage, but only in the ring. Outside of it, he's as scrupulous as can be, letting the police break his hand rather than fighting back. Russell generally prefers thinking to action, positioning solitary contemplation as an absolute necessity. Enabled by a family that always averts its gaze from his drug problems, brother Dicky (Christian Bale) has to go to jail to get some perspective. There's a memorable shot of Dicky running around the prison courtyard in circles, the camera planted in one spot and spinning slowly with him, a rare physical manifestation of a thought process.

When it's time to recreate the fights, Russell's more interested in their texture, both courtside ? paying strict attention to the crowd as much as the fight ? and visually (he got his hands on the same data cams HBO used to film the original fights, and the blurry analog is right on). That title ? not The Boxer, mind you ? is a reference to Micky fighting for his right to self-definition, a burden Russell's characters insist upon.

To return to the original question: even with the film's many virtues ? its evocation of time and place, solid performances, a refreshingly irresponsible sense of humor when it comes to the sisters ? do we still want David O. Russell making a boxing movie that features an honest-to-goodness, unironic training montage? The answer is yes, for a few reasons. By explicitly presenting a man with a body built for destruction fighting an internal battle about breaking free from his background, Russell again gives us the cerebral Wahlberg: not the guy screaming entertaining profanities in The Departed, but a guy whose mookish appearance in no way contradicts his eagerness to plunge into thorny intellectual and ethical terrain.

The same goes for the film: an outwardly conventional premise doesn't stop Russell from returning to his regular concerns.