(Originally written in January 2011, reposted November 2012)
A doozy of an inspirational populist crowd pleaser with big
performances, David O. Russell’s The Fighter could be catalogued as
unabashed awards-season bait. It seems an uncomplicated enough, family-oriented
blue collar picture (with some f-words thrown in) that will have audiences
cheering for a stepping stone boxer and his fight to the welterweight
championship, and leaving with their expectations more than satisfied. This is
a far cry from the quirky and philosophical I Heart Huckabees (2004),
Russell's divisive previous effort that could only find a kind of audience that
was as intellectually precocious as its subject matter. The Fighter is
about the practicalities of a career path coupled with an aggression that is
more private than public, and Mickey Ward (Mark Wahlberg) is the 31-year-old
prodigal son striving to succeed on the road of pugnacious accomplishment. He
had great promise, but is running out of time. His peak boxing years almost out
of his grasp, he fears becoming a disappointment. He lives in the shadow of
failure, as his older half-brother, Dickie Eklund (Christian Bale) tries to
relive the past in Mickey, while hiding from the reality of a future he threw
away in favor of crack addiction. Russell is no stranger to making nakedly
personal films about family (his debut was the wildly uncomfortable incest
comedy Spanking the Monkey), but even
though The Fighter is an acquired
project, the first in which he had no (credited) hand in the screenplay, it
comes from the heart, landing its punches obliquely this time.
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| Dickie Eklund (Christian Bale) dominated by images of himself. |
Russell was himself a late bloomer in the indie
movie movement (he was 36 when Spanking
the Monkey was released in 1994, with some short film work behind him), and
still has yet to fulfill his early promise. The 1999 Gulf War heist drama Three Kings was a moderate success,
marred by stories of on-set fighting between Russell and star George Clooney,
in addition to the grumblings of writer John Ridley, whose treatment was
appropriated by the director. I Heart
Huckabees was a box office failure.
His next film Nailed couldn’t
get finished. Russell is marked with one of the most difficult reputations in
Hollywood, and he’s only getting older. Mulling over The Fighter, the
film is a sweeping gesture by a talented filmmaker, examining
the nature of his own profession (filmed images), who feels he’s running out of
time. Like Mickey and Dickie, he’s at odds with the camera, struggling to
control images and ease the existential and familial shit that plagues him. A
film set, a boxing ring, a household – it’s all wrought with conflict and
invasive violence.
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| Home movies: The Fighter |
The Fighter may be viewed as a struggling director's
opportunity to "sell out," but rather Russell's acquisition of the material
may have been a kind of gift in a time of need. After the commercial failure of
Huckabees, Russell made plans to satirize the dire state of the United
States healthcare system. Titled Nailed, the project appears to be an
ambitious, Strangelove-like ensemble indicting the entire
political/economic apparatus, the story being about a woman accidentally shot
in the head with a nail gun and who subsequently cannot find proper medical
coverage; the effects of the accident lead her to be overpowered by sexual
desires, which are taken advantage of by an up and coming politician. Nailed
would have been perfectly timed for a release after the election of Barack
Obama and the healthcare debates that followed, but production was shut down
three times, actors quit (e.g. James Caan, after one of those Russell squabbles),
and financing failed to be secured for completion. Russell's behavior on the
set did little to aid his reputation as a difficult administrator, and the
filmmaker found years of work and millions of dollars leading to an unfinished
movie that no one would touch. He was out of work, and at over 50 years old
without a new release in five years, also running out of time.
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| Early promise: David O. Russell uses the actual footage of Eklund vs. Leonard |
Enter Darren Aronofsky,
another maverick visionary whom despite any of his own set-backs (the troubled
production history and release of his only big studio film, The Fountain),
had succeeded in cementing a consistently provocative body of work with Pi,
Requiem for a Dream, and then most successfully The Wrestler. Aronofsky's follow-up to The Wrestler
was to be The Fighter, perhaps a kind of glass-half-full companion to
the downbeat Mickey Rourke starrer. In an all-too-convenient swap of material,
Aronofsky decided to pursue another – and more fitting – companion piece to The
Wrestler that he has conceived long before, moving out of the ring and onto
the ballerina stage with Black Swan. Remaining as a credited executive
producer, Aronofsky passed The Fighter on to the out-of-work Russell.
Perhaps Aronofsky and
the film's star and chief coordinator, Wahlberg (who had worked with Russell
twice before), saw this as a perfect fit for Russell. Whereas many young
filmmakers found their footing in their 20s fresh out of film school, Russell
didn't release a feature film until he was 36, 1994's indie comedy Spanking
the Monkey, which won him a prize at Sundance. After the delightful
low-budget screwball farce Flirting with Disaster, he moved his capital
towards a big budget studio endeavor at Warner Bros., 1999's Gulf War
amalgamation of action, politics, and comedy, Three Kings, starring
George Clooney, Wahlberg, Ice Cube, and Spike Jonze as four 1991 Iraq War
soldiers who come across some of Saddam Hussein's stashed gold and plot to
heist it out of the country. Off the bat, Russell's participation was a
forceful and single-focused one, as he disallowed any participation from the
original screenwriter, John Ridley, to the extent that he claims never to have
read Ridley's original script so as to not disrupt his own original ideas.
Worse than the predictable Writers Guild tiffs involving who gets what credit
was Russell's chaotic and despotic directorial methods, one of obstinate
hard-edged aggression to both crew members and celebrated movie stars like
Clooney. Seen by some as verbally abusive, furious in the stabilization of his
vision, he eventually came to blows on the set with Clooney in a
much-publicized confrontation during the final phases of production, the actor
saying "life's too short" when asked if he'd ever work with Russell
again.
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| God's Eye View on ESPN |
Adding to Russell's reputation were the spats he
had with actress Lily Tomlin during I Heart Huckabees' shooting, which
I’d venture have been seen on YouTube more than the film itself was viewed in
theaters and on DVD. Ecumenical camaraderie between the director and his
cast/crew are elements not to be heard of on a Russell set, as the filmmaker
was in the constant position of a poised fighter in a defensive position,
lashing out aggressively when his choices were criticized. News then followed
from the set of Nailed, where James Caan quit after Russell would not
allow the actor to make the gurgling sounds of choking on a cookie a specific
way. Caan, himself an actor with a pugnacious reputation, refused to vocalize
as his character died – the way Russell directed him to do it – stating that in
reality a choking victim would be unable to make any sound. That simple
conflict over "sound or no sound" led to Caan "resigning,” and
eventually the movie shut down entirely. Russell is talented, but he's a
fighter, and not in any kind of flowery idealistic sense of the struggling
artist; he's literally a director who seems to foster animosity on his sets,
even to the detriment of his career going anywhere.
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| Russell's camera, like Dickie's fist, is an aggressor. |
This is
essentially speculative. But knowing these stories about David O. Russell and
the pickle of his career, in addition to the promise of his early prospects, gives The Fighter's opening minutes an aura of rebellious bliss that beautifully fits Russell's
clenched-fist soul. The intro to this film has the soulful grunge of
The Heavy's "How You Like Me Now" beating along with Mickey Ward's
training with Dickie, as the brothers' journey on the gilded road of boxing
legend is captured by a documentary film crew. The in-your-face lyrics denoting
a temperament of ferocious self affirmation attains its crescendo as the camera
dollies back from Mickey at an accelerated speed, conveying a sense of abundant and physical splendor. The high
altitude of movement and character we're seeing during these opening credits
and introductions as Mickey's silently punching the air and Dickie's flinging
his own self forth with his endlessly brash talking, seems a kind of statement
on Russell's own part, embracing the trajectory of his reputation. The 1990s
indie enthusiasm for the younger Russell is in synch with the lyrics. Of course, in the context of The Fighter the
song is directly linked to Dickie's stasis and prospects, as the man who in the
1970s knocked down Sugar Ray Leonard, and then became a crack addict. He will
live out the past through his younger brother Mickey, the great new pride of
Lowell, Massachusetts.
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| Melissa Leo as the latest of David O. Russell's colorful and overbearing mothers. |
But these forceful, self-destructive personalities
fit Russell’s mold, as the director’s embarking on his own rebirth here. It
also cleanly fits onto a slate of themes explored in previous Russell pictures,
particularly regarding a young man's relationship to his family and teachers,
which at times can be a little too close (the mother/son incest of Spanking
the Monkey), as he struggles to break free from the schematic rules laid
out before him to become his own man (Jason Schwartzman's self-realization
between Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin's 'Existential Detectives' and Isabelle
Huppert's nihilist in I Heart Huckabees). The impositions of self
definition here are, yes, family and corporate structures of capital
(determining who Mickey fights, often against his own self interest), but also the
televisual images of film and documentaries, which are as difficult to evade in
the process of self definition as a family's own impositions.
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| On HBO: Mickey Ward (Mark Wahlberg) and brother Dickie, with two very different relationships to the camera. |
The Fighter begins in 1993, the year that Russell's career as a
feature filmmaker began, the locale being Lowell, Massachusetts, identified as
one of the birthplaces of the Industrial Revolution in America, the poverty and
squalor in the tough community projecting again this resonance of empty dreams
and sapped promises from a wellspring that once was prosperous. Meanwhile, the
people in this world are surrounded by, and in essence defined by, the surrounding
camera lenses. Given their ubiquity, the citizens of this neighborhood cannot
avoid responding to such impositions; consequently, you have Mickey who
wants to exist independently of the image, and Dickie who is mugging for it.
Both of them are photographed by a HBO documentary crew in the film’s opening
moments. Mickey is stand-offish, while Dickie cannot stop talking about his
brother – which is essentially just another way for him to talk about himself.
What we have then is a bridge in The Fighter that connects the
provincial birthplace of the Industrial Age to the Information Age, the early
nineties being the time when MTV began assigning "reality" to
television with The Real World. The Fighter is life as film, on
film, all the time, and whether the lens belongs to HBO or ESPN or belongs to Russell's viewfinder, the camera is always running and is nearly
impossible to hide from.
The incredible demands
the videoscopic world makes on Mickey and Dickie is demonstrated early on as
Mickey checks into Atlantic City to make his "comeback," the fight
we've seen him training for during the opening segments. As his family settles
in, they're informed that Mickey's opponent is ill and won't be able to fight –
but there is a replacement. The proposition is impractical for Mickey,
but he won't get paid a dime unless there’s a fight. ESPN is calling the shots,
and if Mickey wants to make any kind of economic headway on the last few months
of activity, he has no choice.
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| Reunited with Sugar Ray: The Fighter |
This is enthusiastically endorsed by Dickie, who
pronounces that Mickey is ready to do anything and take on any comers. Mickey
understands the flip side: his opponent is much bigger than him, a former
middle-weight who outweighs Mickey by nearly 20 pounds. He's told that the
replacement just got out of prison, so "he's probably out of
practice." Of course, he's not, and the 20 extra pounds are not flab but
toned muscle. Mickey gets his ass handed to him, and goes back to Lowell
disappointed. The celebratory hype of a new pride for his hometown amounts to
the fear of being nothing more than a disappointment in his failed brother's
shadow. Of course, making it worse is how everything is on tape and film, with color
commentators (including Sugar Ray Leonard) weighing in.
The confusion of history's integrity becomes a
central issue then in The Fighter, as life is less lived as a ceaseless
progression of "present" moments than it is a simulation of
reality and the past, performed, rewound, and rebroadcast. Dickie's grand
achievement in youth, knocking down Sugar Ray, is not something restaged by
Russell, but the actual footage from 1978 is intercut into The Fighter,
confusing the directorial vantage of history the movie is giving us, with
reality and theatrical simulation, all melting together. Dickie is eager to
re-enact this glory through Mickey, and so is very "actorly,"
over-the-top in his appeals for attention to the camera eye. Mickey, because he
can perceive this so acutely in his brother, is skeptical of the image, as he
is increasingly skeptical of the expectations of his family. He's subdued,
quiet, and passive in front of those same lenses.
There has been an
appropriate amount of award speculation for Christian Bale's magnificent
channeling of Dickie Eklund, as the actor quite amazingly without hesitation throws
himself – perhaps to the detriment of physical and mental health – into the
portrayal of Dickie. This is Bale's much-noted practice as an actor, who is
tireless in his intense research and ability to remain in character throughout
production (the intensity became infamous during his recorded off-camera
tirades as Terminator: Salvation was being filmed: "Be fucking
professional!" – denoting a kind of aggressive dedication that figures
into how Bale got along so well with similar psychological types like David O.
Russell and Michael Mann). Christian Bale lost a lot of weight to play Dickie,
transforming his Batman physique to something wiry, jittery, and unhinging. The
opening scene proclaims Bale's work loudly as "performance as
spectacle," the same way many viewed Christoph Waltz in Inglourious
Basterds, Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight, or Mo'Nique in Precious.
It's a transcendent portrayal that feels dangerous to the audience as it may
have been dangerous for the performer. As such, it is exhilarating.
As Mickey, Wahlberg will not be given nearly as
many accolades for his restrained, but no less remarkable, characterization.
For example, Roger Ebert notes, "The weakness of
the film is the weakness of the leading role." Wahlberg's Mickey is not
"sufficiently analytical," according to Ebert, and seems to be constructed
with rougher edges than the more conventionally developed over-powering
characterizations we see in Bale's Dickie, or Melissa Leo's similarly marvelous
rendering of the boys' manager/mother. "Mickey Ward has less personality
than the hero of any boxing movie I can remember," Ebert says, and the
gist of his criticism is technically correct, but the great critic has
himself not sufficiently analyzed the dynamics of Wahlberg's withdrawn approach
in the context of a movie that is less about boxing and even family
than it is about how individuals perform – and are expected to perform – for
cameras.
Indeed, one of Russell's techniques here was to use
the cameras that were actually used by ESPN in the early 1990s to capture a
particular kind of period visual sense. Home videos, antiquated news video,
live sports broadcasts, HBO documentary video-making, and of course the
"film" The Fighter all commingle to the extent that in many
places in the picture, we are not sure from what camera we are viewing things:
is this ESPN's camera? HBO's? Or is this the omniscient/invisible eye of David
O. Russell and his cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema? As in our own chaotic videoscopic
Information Age, the cutting lines between the officially documented and the poetically
private are blurred.
The possible annoyance of this is felt in Mickey
Ward as he takes a local bartender, Charlene (Amy Adams), on a date to an
art-house cinema. The choice is very surprising: Fernando Trueba's Belle
Epoque, an arty endeavor set during the Spanish Civil War that no blue
collar guy from Lowell would ever dream of showing to his date. As Mickey and
Charlene walk up to the theater, we overhear a smarmy, educated young man say
loudly to his cinephile
companions, "The cinematography is supposed to be gorgeous!",
a lovely and self-deprecating comic insertion by Russell, who's a film lover's
filmmaker. Hearing the cinephile, Mickey frowns.
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| Not really giving a shit about the "gorgeous cinematography": Amy Adams and Mark Wahlberg in The Fighter go see Belle Epoque. |
It's not just that Mickey Ward – to say nothing of
his date – wouldn't give a shit about the photographic virtues of a movie (Charlene
notes that he fell asleep during the movie). But if we look at this
deliberately over photographed/videographed/cinematographed movie The
Fighter in a poetic way beyond its concrete, blue-collar movie-lover's
crowd-pleasing satisfactions, we can make interpretations regarding the
overabundance of moving images, and how they have power over us and, in
essence, define us; the actual circumstances of a "thing in itself"
may be manipulated, cut, and lit in a fashion that communicates something
distinct from the nuanced truism of a given situation or individual. The
"gorgeous cinematography" of the camera eye haunts Mickey, and he
doesn't trust it.
That's how Wahlberg's performance functions in the
context of The Fighter, and makes it distinct from Bale's. Bale/Dickie
is eager to be the over-the-top ham actor; it's a golden marriage of character
and performer. Just as appropriate is Wahlberg to Mickey's simplicity and
distance. Mickey does not want to embrace the usual grand-standing postures of
the sports hero, whether it's Rocky Balboa, Jake LaMotta, or Muhammad Ali – all
of whom had actors play them to Academy Award nominations or wins (so too will
be the case with Bale, or the similarly camera ready personalities displayed by
Melissa Leo or Amy Adams). Mickey does not want to go through the hackneyed
struggles on a path of glory; he's a straight-edged man who feels like he's
running out of time and understands the best place for him to be is away from
the kinds of conflict that would, in a boxing movie, compel the performer to
act histrionically. He wants to be free from the impositions of family and
image, and just wants to succeed while he is physically able. We can perceive
the tragedy of Dickie Eklund in the way he too-willingly embraces the power of
images. In prison, he greets the HBO production about his life like a movie
star at his own premiere, proud that he will be seen by hundreds of thousands
of people.
The scene where we watch the HBO documentary along
with Dickie, Mickey, Mom, and all quarters of the family, is then tremendously
significant. Mickey's bitter ex-wife tells him that she's forcing their son to
watch the documentary, even after Mickey begs her to turn it off. "I want
him to see who his uncle really is," she responds. Mickey and
Dickie's mother is changed by what she's watching, wondering why
"they" are doing this to her son, as the images make her see Dickie
in a way she has been resistant to acknowledge. "It's the way he is,
mom," Mickey tells her, "But you refuse to see it." Images
assuage us and play into our inherited schema. But in the same way that
Shakespeare often will have his characters over-hear themselves, and so in that
process of self-observation, be open to change, Dickie's attitude changes during
the HBO screening in prison. He sees his life, his own self, and
understands in his currently sober state of mind that his son will be watching
this in addition to everyone else close to him. He is disgusted. He demands the
show be turned off, so shortly after esteeming it with enthusiasm: "That's
my fucking life!" he cries to the fellow inmates, who seem to be
captivated by what they're watching as entertainment.
Of course, Russell is in the business of
making images and he understands their power, and here he's making his first movie about real people and actual
events, the challenge being to make a conscious examination that is richer than
hollow and hackneyed biopics. The presentation of the Dickie Eklund documentary
is the turning point in The Fighter, where self-definitions are
re-adjusted as the viewers (Dickie, Mickey, mom) begin to see themselves in the
mash-up of moving pictures. Beyond passive viewing, they become activated
through the process of self-identification. Russell wants to remind us that the
process of film ingestion is capable of being psychologically intimate,
dialectical, and transformative, beyond the escapist catharsis that it is
manufactured as too often. This is demonstrated in the casting. One of the main
characters, a local cop who trains Mickey whenever Dickie's absent, Mickey
O'Keefe, plays himself, and the mannerisms of this non-actor conveys a certain
authenticity to the material while also beautifully reminding us of the
dynamics of true-life reconstruction and dramatization. The other faces in the
film (for example, some of Mickey and Dickie's sisters – of which there are
seven), feel like real faces pulled from the streets of Lowell, as
opposed to actor faces. Actor faces are, after all, treated with a bit of
contempt, as the sisters oppose Charlene because she's an "MTV girl,"
which is a symbolic way of saying that she's attractive and sexually nefarious
– again playing into the videoscopic context of The Fighter, where
contextual media/broadcasting tropes define individuals.
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| Mickey O'Keefe plays himself in The Fighter. |
At this stage in the story, after Dickie has been
paroled and Mickey has decided to take on new management, he has become a
surprising success, earning an underdog's title shot and redefining himself as
a welterweight phenomenon. Instead of opposition and enormous conflict
involving Mickey between Dickie, his sisters, Charlene, the new managers,
Mickey O'Keefe, the mother and father, and the media, there is an invigorating
reconciliation as Mickey Ward accepts the conflict while also persisting in
doing things his own way. He steadfastly refuses the camera, his family, his
neighborhood, or his girlfriend to define him, while also making peace with
them – as long as they make peace with each other. Dickie too, who seems to be
on the verge of relapse after parole, walks to the crack den that has
victimized him and instead of getting a fix, drops off the celebratory
"Welcome Home" cake his family offered him, transcending the elements
that have hitherto defined him, whether that be drug addiction, the family, and
most significantly the demons and lost dreams of his past. He steps outside of
the simulation and into the action of the present moment, in Mickey's corner,
clean and sober.
The poetry of that reconciliation between the image
and reality is fully realized when the end credits begin, as Russell bookends
his film with the two shot of Mickey and Dickie talking to the camera, a
reflection of the image that began The Fighter. Instead of Mark Wahlberg
and Christian Bale, it is the true-life Mickey and Dickie. This could be a
moving true-life closure that we see in other biopics, but as we hear the two
men thank the crew of The Fighter, a more meaningful thought is offered.
These two men are out of the simulated fiction of a feature film where they are
portrayed by movie stars and can exist in the real world as themselves,
conscious of the camera eye, with its 'gorgeous cinematography,' a world where
the truth of subject matter and history is inconsequential to the lensing of
it. They are free from the prisons of "glorious moments" and are able
to exist peacefully in time.
David O. Russell himself may have finally achieved
his long-awaited TKO then with this picture, already on pace to be his most profitable
and highly regarded work, and which has not been scathed in the least by on-set
clashes or fist-fights. Far from a convenient hired gun project, The Fighter
has Russell's fiery soul wired into it; though a boxing picture, there are
seemingly very few minutes featuring professional bouts, most of the fights
being outside of the ring or inside the mind. It would be nice to think that
the contentious filmmaker, though there's still much fight left in him, has
reached his own acceptance of permanent truculence, coupled with the
structuralism of an artful performance: the poetry of aggression. Like Mickey
Ward's title attainment in the late rounds of his own boxing career, maybe the
Sundance darling has at last lived up to his promise.
