Ringside treat

There you were thinking boxing flicks had been flogged to death, and then David O. Russell's beautiful bruiser The Fighter steps into the ring.

The film follows the rise of "Irish" Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) as he overhauls his languishing reputation in a bid to become a bona fide boxing champ. But Micky has battles closer to home to endure before he can even dream of scooping a title.

A self-confessed journeyman, Micky relies on a distinctly family setup, with his mother (Melissa Leo) and older brother Dicky (Christian Bale) helping his limping career along. But are these two inadvertently blocking Micky from a higher plane of fighting?

Sparring partner Dicky is his younger brother's idol, and everyone else's, it would seem - a near-mythical local status cemented by a single fight 14 years past, in which he floored legend Sugar Ray Leonard.

But all is not as it seems with the older sibling. As it turns out, the only reason Dicky won that fight was because Sugar Ray slipped. And that's not the worst of it: An HBO documentary on Dicky's "comeback" transpires to be an exposé on his spiraling crack addiction. Maybe not the greatest role model, then.

Micky's mother, meanwhile (a smoking performance from Leo) is a powerhouse of peroxide and attitude, who books his opponents, the kind that are 20 pounds meatier and proceed to punch him into a pulp. Her "mother knows best" mentality acts more as a body block in the way of his ambitions, while her "after all I've done for you" tirades are hard for Micky to come back at.

Motivated by new girlfriend, Charlene (Amy Adams), Micky decides to strike out on his own, causing unrest in the Ward family ranks and prompting a particularly comical scene in which Micky's mother, accompanied by his shockingly attired coven of ugly sisters, go angrily a-knocking on Charlene's door.

That Wahlberg isn't up for a Best Actor Oscar is unjust, and the only cause is that his understated depiction of this humble boxer doesn't allow for requisite awards-ceremony sound bites.

Fighting is not Micky's life; he doesn't subscribe to the hyperbolic declamations of his opponents, and if he bumps into them before a fight, simply wishes them "good luck." Beneath this politeness though is a searing desire to better himself and disprove the naysayers, family and otherwise. Wahlberg straddles this dichotomy astutely.

Talking of understated performances, Adams reveals another layer of her acting skin as earthy bargirl Charlene, who has the brass to face-off with her lover's possessive family and the grace to gradually win them around. It's another skilled balancing act, merging qualities both maternal and pugnacious.

And for all that, Bale still sidles up to steal the show. Dicky may be a washed-up has-been, but this neither registers with him nor his fawning mom and sisters, or indeed the majority of his hometown Lowell.

His skeletal form and Stallone-like slurrings are sad enough to behold, but it is Dicky's delusions that make him truly tragic; it's obvious he won't fight again. Still, Bale makes this drug-addled loser genial, even funny in a childlike way; just watch his cowardly self-defenestrations into a pile of garbage every time his mother rings the doorbell.

Dicky's limitless though often skewed love for his brother is his most poignant attribute of all, and such a complex character could only be so convincingly portrayed by an actor in seriously fine form.

All right, so The Fighter makes us endure a couple of visitations from every sports movie's best friend "Mr. Montage," in which Micky performs crunches and feints to Aerosmith's cock-rock anthem "Back in the Saddle." But that's easily forgiven as otherwise this is a near-faultless film.

What could easily have been a shopworn underdog tale is instead an acutely observed drama, in which family and lovers are forced to compromise and reconcile for the sake of one person's dreams.

A finely tuned script and a lot of belief in it, along with some impeccably measured acting turns ensure The Fighter is much more than just a film about boxing.

Will Noble can be reached at
wnoble@praguepost.com