The Fighter
Boxing movies: from Raging Bull to Rocky, Marriage (almost) always been happy. Same power in the emotion, maybe. A similar sense of staging shaped baring too. Still, the two arts that combine passion and each show are certainly wonderfully made for each other. The Fighter, new work by David O’Russell (The Three Kings, I Heart Huckabees), comes only confirm this fact.
It starts with a true story. A story of rival brothers became friends in front of their faces painted too mom. A history of grandeur and decadence, to erase shadows and light faded, learning and redemption.
This story, David O’Russell reminding that it is indeed true by staging a clever, restless and sometimes lyrical (you must see this generic traveling the streets of Lowell, Massachusetts, where both hail brothers moving cast of characters too improbable not to be true).
Sometimes reminiscent of the aesthetic “ever closer to you” that developed in Darren Aronofsky The Wrestler – FYI, Aronofsky would make the The Fighter before you pass the hot potato to O’Russell and not become a producer – and sometimes that much more romantic and the swirling Casino Scorsese, achieving O’Russell, bathed in warm light and texture, made for a lot in energy and magnitude of this film. Despite a dip, some repetitive dialogue, The Fighter has a unique perspective on the universe he is filming. Knowing, it must be reported, beautifully filmed the fights.
And it is precisely this gaze, full of tenderness and empathy, which allows the filmmaker does not ridicule his characters. It would have been easy. Of the seven sisters of our heroes, crimped hair, t-shirts too short on soft flesh, bloated faces impossible, to their mother (Melissa Leo great) through Mike’s girlfriend (Amy Adams amazing) or men stuck in this community matriarchal ruling over a city destitute and dilapidated, the gallery of figures lent white trash back to the condescension, the misery.
With intelligence, The Fighter denied this facility. And will even book the royal treatment to the two brothers by offering complementary and two interpreters each impressive in their registry: in the right corner, Mark Wahlberg, sweet, perhaps even soft, but the game should be limited to this brother here perfectly seeking personality and in the left corner, Christian Bale, intensity and charisma bordering on madness own hallucinations and who manages to make this ex-boxer addicted to crack pathetic and grand at once.
