David O. Russell's The Fighter is a movie with a chip on its shoulder. Whenever it should bounce backward, it lunges forward; it jabs instead of feints, and stomps down hard when it needs to dance. Based on the true story of pro-boxer half-brothers Dickie Eklund and Micky Ward, from the working-class town of Lowell, Mass., The Fighter masquerades as an old-fashioned crowd-pleaser in which an underdog makes good, largely by accepting the love and support of his family. There's just one problem: Micky -- the underdog, played by Mark Wahlberg -- has every reason to think the members of his family are clowns and losers, but in the end, the movie won't let him recognize it. Russell sets up a gritty, grimy tale of rivalry and resentment between brothers, only to insist on steering the thing into one big group hug. It's a case of a director either not following his instincts, or not having many to follow in the first place -- it's hard to say which.
Christian Bale plays Dicky Eklund, a former welterweight who was at one point called "the pride of Lowell" after going the distance with Sugar Ray Leonard, even though he lost the fight. The movie opens in 1993, by which point Dicky is the pride of no one -- beyond, that is, his cartoonishly coarse, doting mother, Alice (Melissa Leo), who looks past her son's glassy eyes and leering grin and sees only a pugilistic little prince. Dicky is an unrepentant crackhead: As the movie opens, he's being followed around by a team of filmmakers; he mutters to anyone who cares to listen (a shockingly large number of people, actually) that the movie guys are documenting his big comeback, though they're really just recording what happens when a local hero gives it all up for the crack pipe.
Dicky grins for the camera -- the documentary guys' and Russell's -- his mouth twisting into a wretched smirk. He slings wisecracks of the "Your mother wears army boots" variety. He has the woozy, not-quite-there demeanor of a boxer who's absorbed too many punches, and the already-scrambled eggs of his brain have been further fried by drugs. Still, he insists on "training" his younger half-brother, Micky, prematurely taking credit for guiding him to some future imagined victory, while Mama Alice gazes upon his gaunt, snickering visage, adoringly.
On the other hand, she has little use for Micky, the "good" son who now has a shot at the fame Dicky squandered. She insists on managing Micky's career, which means only that when Micky loses a fight, it's Micky's fault; when he wins, it's all thanks to Dicky. Meanwhile, Micky -- stalwart, hardworking, disciplined -- tries to be a decent father to his young daughter (he's estranged from the girl's mother) and tentatively hopes to kindle a romance with a local bartender in short shorts, Charlene (Amy Adams), a woman with good common sense and a nice set of buns. Isn't that what every working-class joe and aspiring boxer wants?
The tragedy of The Fighter is that Wahlberg's performance suggests a character who wants more. And yet Russell barely seems to notice how much subtlety Wahlberg brings to his role, or to the movie at large. He's far more fixated on the vaguely incestuous bond between Dicky and Alice, and his camera is crazy about them, too: He indulges all sorts of brassy overacting and "Looka me, I'm a drug addict!" grandstanding, as if he believed this captures the flavor of the "local" people.
But this is a case of actors' condescending to their characters instead of just playing them, something Wahlberg and Adams never do. Russell, working from a script by Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson (from a story by Tamasy, Johnson and Keith Dorrington), appears to have forgotten everything he knew about crisp shaping and sharp storytelling circa Three Kings in 1999. The Fighter is far more naturalistic than either that movie or the dismal one that followed it (the 2004 I Heart Huckabees); it seems Russell wanted to head in a completely different direction, but he's not sure what do in this new territory.
He does get some of the time-and-place details right. Micky and Dicky have a dozen or so surly, doughnut-shaped sisters with overprocessed hair (Alice has burned through at least one husband over the years), and they scowl through the proceedings like a Greek chorus in acid-wash jeans. These women -- played by an assortment of scarily well-cast and well-costumed actresses -- resent Charlene for the hold she has on Micky. (Mostly, they seem to hate her because she had the nerve to complete a few semesters of college.) At the peak of their anger, they set out to ambush Charlene at her house, clomping onto her porch in their chunky white sneakers and Payless skimmers, spoiling for a bout of wicked-pissa hair-pulling. Whatever the other flaws of The Fighter may be, nothing captures the flavor of Lowell, circa 1993, better than this clan of bully babes.
But Russell doesn't seem to know how or when to ratchet down the broadness. Leo, with her big, frosty hair and doorknocker earrings, chomps down on her character and won't let go: She shakes it with a pit bull's conviction, until there's no possibility of life left in it. And while Bale's performance is being highly praised in certain circles -- at their recent Black Mass, the National Board of Review anointed him Best Supporting Actor -- it's mannered in the worst way. Bale reportedly lost some 30 pounds to play the role (he pulled off a similar stunt for The Machinist), but that's not acting -- it's weight loss. He loads his performance with excessive screwball tics and twitches -- he's clearly studied this crackhead stuff -- and it adds up to a nice, tall toothpick-tower of technique. Here Bale, sometimes a marvelous actor, shows everything he knows instead of simply allowing it to run silently in the background.
It doesn't help that Russell and his cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema (also the DP behind Let the Right One In) shoot the movie's fights indistinctly, chopping them into bits so we can't clearly see the action. They also overuse hand-held cameras, often roving from character to character instead of cutting. The camera seems to be absent-mindedly looking for something, but what? It's the filmmaking equivalent of idly searching for change in the crevices of a couch.
And in between all this, Wahlberg is characteristically laid-back and believable -- he plays a guy aching to break out, and yet he never breaks a sweat. Wahlberg, for all his brawn, is very much an interior actor, to the extent that it sometimes looks as if he's doing nothing -- here, he underplays everything, skimming along just beneath the movie's surface, slipping right past Leo and Bale and their outsized gestures. Adams is a great foil for him: She's shed some of her exhausting perkiness and replaced it with take-no-prisoners flintiness.
But both of these actors are underserved by the story's unsatisfying, lumpy dramatic shape. The movie's ending is presented as a triumph, and it doesn't sit right: Everything that's led up to it shows us that Micky stands to be trapped by his family, not bolstered by it. And when Micky finally accepts that largely figurative but also somewhat literal group hug, Russell presents it as a moment of happiness and acceptance. The Fighter becomes, strangely, a feel-good story with a happy ending, even though in the story's terms, Micky has been beaten into submission by the wrong opponent -- his own flesh and blood.