The Foyta

He may be a royal asshole, but Christian Bale can act.  If he doesn’t win Best Supporting Actor for The Fighter, it will be a crime against humanity.  I can’t specify what it is he does and what it takes to play a convincing character, but every second he is on the screen he seems to be telling me something.  He is such a force that you want to see what he’s doing, even when he isn’t the center of the scene.

Bale’s very convincing because he is able to find a unique and even humorous side to his addition.  Too often we’ve seen characters with drug addictions go through the same motions.  They get a taste, usually after we’ve established their downy innocence.  They descend, alienate their peers, screw over their wives (I can’t think of a female addiction film at the moment) and children and usually end up in jail.  This is not always rock bottom, but it is at the very least in our sights.  There’s a scene, you know it well.  Eyes are winced.  Fists clenched.  Perspiration, lots of it.  They go through hell and come out clean.  There are often flashbacks, voice of a living ghost, demons to overcome, haunting our protagonist in his darkest hour.  He comes out clean.  We rarely see a relapse.  Much of this can be said of The Fighter.  The detox scene is just as cliched as the scene in any other biopic and Dickie seems to triumph over his addiction easier than you’d think.  But the opening scenes of the film are really something special.

We meet Dickie already deep in the throes of his addiction.  He deceives himself into believing HBO wants to make a film about a comeback to his boxing career.  We can see from the get-go there’s something wrong with this picture.  When we learn well into the film the documentary was about crack addiction, you may not have guessed it but you’re certainly not surprised.

Dickie’s addiction is less introverted.  We aren’t meant to see how the drug affects him, but his family.  Mark Wahlburg’s role almost takes a backseat to Bale’s and one wonders at times if his character only exists as a punching back for Dickie’s many drug-addled fuck ups.  The movie could have ended when Dickie delivered the cake to his former crack-head friends and wiped his hands of them.  The ensuing fight where Mickey wins the championship – the scene we thought we were waiting for – feels anti-climactic compared to Dickie’s accomplishments.  There’s a parallel comparison to be made between Bale’s scene stealing performance, and the favoritism bestowed upon the character, Dickie by his mother and sisters.  No matter how bad he gets, he is always overshadowing his little brother.  In his mother’s eyes, Mickey’s career is merely a way for Dickie to get back on his feet.

And it is easy to see why.  While goofy, and often the butt of jokes he doesn’t see, Dickie nonetheless outshines his brother, endearing himself to everyone around.  While Mickey sits in the background, brow furrowed, arms stubbornly folded, Dickie is in your face cracking jokes, forcing you to laugh, making you happier than you were before he entered the room.  When his mother digs him out of the crack house he is living in and the horror of what her son has become is thrown in her face, he knows just which Bee Gees song to sing, lifting her spirits and the terrible train wreck that is his son – stark evidence of her failure as a mother – are swept away in an instant.  Back to the Dickie and Alice show, a nonstop force, sisters in tow behaving as a twisted methed-out version of a Greek chorus line, capable of bulldozing Mickey into…whatever makes it so they can continue to bully him.

It took Wahlburg something like ten years to get this film made.  Numerous false starts and crew changes kept him in impeccable shape over the years as he was always able to see the film at the end of the tunnel, ready at a moments notice to play a professorial fighter, never knowing what obstacle would be thrown in his way.  I really admire that dedication, and you know there’s something about this story that he felt was really important.

Wahlburg has become a really great actor in the past decade and in The Fighter he gives another solid performance.  He plays the perfect straight man to Bale’s over-the-top version of his bigger brother.  But you want more from him.  He doesn’t have to be a complex person, boxing is not a complex sport (there are 13 rules to boxing, compare that to the NFL rule book), I just wanted him to be a little more human, maybe develop a little over time (even in the end he was giving in to his mother and brother when they got in his face).  In the end his triumph seems staged.  You’ve seen this ending before and while the journey may be the important part of this film, there’s no drama to its resolution.  He just wins.  I found out later that the fight he won was a monumental performance by both boxers in real life.  Mickey takes a beating and is able to muster the strength to win.  But I didn’t feel the magnitude of his comeback in the film.

I heard somewhere that since Rocky was first released, Hollywood has released boxing films on average of one every year.  They aren’t all winners, but there’s been enough successful films to justify the genre’s existence.  Something about the sport will always get us to the theaters, even when the amount of actual boxing fans is in decline.  I think The Fighter is one of the better boxing films I’ve seen, but what made it unique didn’t seem to play out through the entire film.  As time went on we felt more and more like we’d seen this movie before.  The end was anti-climactic to the extent that it seemed to happen too fast. In the end, I think it lasted too long, go figure.

Whenst next we meet, I’ll tell you the tragic inevitable story of how I cried watching a fucking cartoon.  Enjoy this lovely holiday weekend.

Alouishis