nan | 楠木

Hours before the Academy Awards this year, I saw The Fighter in San Francisco. I’m really glad I saw it – it’s a delightful film of genuine emotions and the source material is multi-faceted with plenty of food for thought.

The film stars Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale, as brothers Micky and Dicky. They come from a extended dysfunctional family with low income and low education. Their only prospect is their talent for boxing, first displayed by the elder Dicky, who unfortunately squandered his career to a drug addiction, leaving Micky as the only person in the family that’s apparently generating income. And Micky seems to have his best years behind him, being poorly managed by his mom and Dicky, and suffering a string of losses. His life seems to take a turn for the better when he meets Charlene, a local bartender who has also squandered most of her life away but who desperately wants a change. Under her influence, Micky breaks away from his family’s grip and starts looking out for himself; meanwhile, Dicky finds himself in prison. The rest of the story follows the tensions and drama of Micky trying to revive his career while also keeping his family together.

Micky is the type of role that Mark Wahlberg could play in his sleep, and the actor is evidently very at ease. It’s a decent performance through and through, and he is well supported by two Best Supporting Academy Awards in Christian Bale and Melissa Leo. Bale again demonstrates great versatility and range in his acting, while Leo deftly portrays the emotionally fragile and incompetent mom who tries to run the family.

Boxing, or “violent” sports in general (e.g. American Football), always make for great movie material, as the sport itself becomes a natural metaphor for the struggles outside the sports-arena. In the case of boxing films, which seem to be particularly popular, this is often cliché. What separates a great boxing film (say, Million Dollar Baby or Raging Bull, and perhaps the original Rocky) from a good / average boxing film (e.g. The Hurricane, Cinderella Man) is often how un-formulaic the film is in leveraging the sports-as-life metaphor (and obviously how original / creative the script is). It is not surprising that the main characters of all the above mentioned boxing films are struggling economically in life, since boxing (in terms of people who actually do the sport) is rooted in the lower socio-economic class to begin with. Therefore social inequality and topics such as racism are naturally found in the narratives, but the better films (in my opinion) skillfully layer these topics into the narrative, as opposed to making them the center of the narrative (nothing wrong with this by the way, just that this is more likely to result in clichéd scenarios). The Fighter is blessed in that it is first and foremost a story of brotherly love, and only second a story about the dysfunctional lives of the poor. This gives it richness and depth.

8/10