Fighting For Class

[The Fighter ]

Directed by David O. Russell

Runtime: 114 min.

Americans used to seeing trickedup versions of themselves in the movies (or degraded-by-narcissism versions on reality TV) will be startled at the honesty of David O. Russell’s The Fighter. Even I was thrown by the vivacity in Russell’s semirealistic account of Dicky Eklund, the Boston Irish welterweight tagged “The Pride of Lowell, Massachusetts”; his younger sibling, the upcoming boxer Micky Ward; and their boisterous, blasted troop, which is an example of the social phenomenon known as a “blended family.” Dicky and Micky are half-brothers whose mother, Alice, gave birth to nine children, including seven sisters— who got nuttin’ to do with them prestigious Ivy League colleges for girls.

At first I thought the sharp accents, bad grammar and worse behavior were extreme—like Christian Bale’s impersonation of down-and-out, emaciated crackhead Dicky (he’s first seen introducing his baby brother to an HBO camera crew shooting him for a documentary) and Melissa Leo’s impersonation of bottle-blond Alice, a tough-broad matriarch projecting her dreams through her boys’ macho athletics. Bale has done grandstanding hollow-eyed body-alteration before (in the tasteless The Machinist), and I didn’t trust Leo since her super-pathetic working-class martyr in the completely awful Frozen River. It took a while to notice that, this time, these actors’ thorough commitment was being put to unpretentious use.

Dicky, Alice and the rest magnify the behavioral truth of white-trash stereotypes; their screw-ups are outrageous, recognizable and hilarious—a New England version of the downright low-life hillbillies in John Ford’s still-neglected 1941 Tobacco Road, an artful exculpation of the record-breaking Broadway hit comedy that ridiculed Southern class defects. New Englander Ford recognized the types, relocated his sensibility and imbued them with his extraordinary American grace. That’s the only precedent for Russell’s remarkable achievement.

Throughout The Fighter, Russell’s camera is perched slightly distant and above the action. It’s an awed perspective: taking in the ghetto atmosphere, yet never being taken-in by it—or by the ideological prejudices that prevent white Americans from ever calling it “the ghetto.” That mainstream media pretense is a form of denying the political basis of class differences that separate Lowell from Cambridge. Russell imparts this political awareness to his story of a family’s struggles while keeping his perspective rigorous and balanced enough to sharpen his actors and avoid dramatic excess.

When young Micky’s sports career (at first managed by Alice and coached by Dicky) begins to follow his depraved brother’s past, he gets pulled away from family influence by Charlene, a barmaid he meets and falls in love with. Mark Wahlberg and Amy Adams, who are pretty, play these roles with romantic commitment, but they’re also straightforward. Micky looks at Charlene like she’s great, a prize. She’s sexy and street-tough (a recent high-school athlete) like he is, with the guts to oppose his family and push him toward achievement. It’s fulfillment, if not success, she has partied and drank away in her own life. Wahlberg and Adams’ exuberance recalls the charisma Daniel Day-Lewis and Emily Watson had as the bright-eyed couple in Jim Sheridan’s The Boxer. Some of Sheridan’s humanist fidelity to the combined truth of social status and personal ambition is apparent in the conflict that erupts with Micky and Charlene’s withdrawal from neighborhood and cultural routine. Like Sheridan, Russell keeps family bonds believably intact— especially in Micky and Dicky’s brotherly rapport and in the extraordinary moment Alice and Dicky commiserate over a Bee Gees song, a pop lament for the defeat of two generations.

The song choice is so smart, it might be a bit too uncanny. But that risk is inseparable from Russell’s intelligence and sensitivity. Russell’s habit of remaking himself with every film is part of his fresh approach to subjects that other filmmakers have degraded. The Fighter is an alert artist’s version of the Boston Irish movie clichés that have recently piled up. After Martin Scorsese’s The Departed solidified the inchoate genre of Boston Irish reprobates— which began with Clint Eastwood’s specious Mystic River and continued in the nonsense of Ben Affleck’s crudely exploitative Gone, Baby, Gone and The Town—Russell redefines the category. He looks right past those banalities of underclass toughness and criminality, but he also sees through the obstacles that created them.

Ethnic sentimentality and class politics clouded the social observation of these Boston Irish cartoons. Scorsese’s was particularly disappointing since he once demonstrated sensitivity to the foundations of the urban underclass, yet eventually gave in to brutal, fatuous mythology—as with Gangs of New York and The Departed. Eastwood and Affleck’s movies (including the sappy boxing film Million Dollar Baby) are just Hollywood rubbish, blurring social relationships into mawkish action flicks and tearjerkers. Russell’s view of lower-class white miscreants is so open-minded and free of moral judgment that it is sociologically startling. It’s politically fresh, just as Russell’s Three Kings was in 1999 with its unexpected view of American foreign policy as a reflection of individual characteristics.

And who expected a putative boxing drama based on real lives to also be a perspicacious observation of America’s current class-identity crisis? The same way Three Kings presaged our post-9/11 Middle East involvement and ongoing Muslim controversies, The Fighter uncannily exposes the underside of Obama-era aristocracy. Not to say this is a Tea Party movie (as inane critics misread Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood); Russell’s astuteness about the way top-down media distorts the population’s condition and self-awareness from bottom-up makes this boxing story even more fascinating. It gets to the essence of society’s left-behinds through the difficulty Micky and Charlene face trying to sustain themselves without being dragged down even by those closest to them.

This intelligence updates and enlivens Hollywood’s saga-of-social-mobility usually found in boxing films like Body and Soul, The Set Up and even Raging Bull. Russell strips away nostalgia about the American Dream. He observes the hair-raising combination of America’s crack epidemic and media domination when that HBO doc crew broadcasts scenes of Dicky smoking a pipe in a Cambodian-immigrant crack house. Alice howls, “What are they doing to us!” Her unfocused use of “they” rings as clueless and accusatory as the liberal sophisticate Valerie Plame and husband in Fair Game. Russell shows how media exploitation neglects a deeper view of a social system and this irony—the film’s masterstroke—sinks in.

All that keeps The Fighter from being a great movie is that the script by Scott Silver and Paul Tamasy misses the influence of Irish Catholicism—fatally absent (as it was in The Departed). Alice repeating, “God has a plan,” and the brothers praying for victory during Micky’s big bout don’t correspond to an understanding of their strained or lost beliefs. Russell’s staging of girl-fight clannishness between Charlene and the too-close-to-caricature seven sisters is so emotionally raw—recalling the terror of Jeff Nichols’ ethnically authentic Shotgun Stories—that the breakdown of civility needs deeper explanation. Otherwise, it’s… well, trashy—unlike most of the film, which redeems Hollywood’s tendency to simultaneously sentimentalize and trash the working class. American movies are rarely as honest as The Fighter. Russell demonstrates that the most important fighting is cultural, familial, personal—and occurs outside the sanction of the boxing ring.