THE FIGHTER

The Fighter wants to be an uplifting weepie and it almost is. It also doesn’t know what else it wants to be and so becomes a mess of many faces by turns comical, poignant, and inspirational. A movie can be all of those things and work, but David O. Russell never finds a balance and scatters the emotional ques so randomly that they all feel out of place.

The story is a text-book tale of triumph over adversity despite being based on the true story of Micky Ward, the welterweight boxer from the industrial city of Lowell, Massachusetts who went on to become world champion after defeating Shea Neary in London.

The themes that have become hallmarks of a Boston-area setting are evident as The Fighter is not so much about boxing as it is about loyalty to family during the darkest times, remembering your blue-collar upbringing, and tight urban communities. To Russell’s credit, he understands the mood of Boston well and brings it out of his cast. Of course, he couldn’t go wrong by casting Mark Whalberg as Micky Ward, who we first see making ends meet as a pavement worker motivated to bigger things not so much for love of the ring but the desire to do well by his daughter and his older brother Dick, under whose shadow he has lived since he saw Dick defeat Sugar Ray Leonard in 1978.

For Whalberg this project meant a lot, growing up near Ward and admiring him much like Ward admired his older brother.

“I want to do him proud,” Whalberg said. “The guy did everything I wish I could have done. He came from nothing, went on to win the world title with all the odds stacked against him. Did it with his mother and his brother. He’s still in the same town to this day. He’s got a regular job. He knows that I’m going to put it all on the line for him.”

To be sure that took a little acting, but Whalberg’s shared roots with Ward made him a natural fit.

“I changed my voice a little,’’ he said. “Micky has such a distinctive voice and not a lot of people outside of that area or the boxing world know Micky Ward, so I didn’t want to lay it on too heavy after doing The Departed and The Perfect Storm. When people come into that world and do an accent, it always drives me crazy.’’

“When I met him he was a 26-year-old mumbling kid from Dorchester who was coming right off of Boogie Nights and he was slouching down on the couch,’’ Russell said of his star. “Now I call him Godfather because he’s literally got a boardwalk empire and a television empire. On this project, he sacrificed his body and he sacrificed his time and he sacrificed his money. He paid for all the training on his nickel because we had no money. He carried the film on his back.’’

Christian Bale, who replaced both Matt Damon and Brad Pitt, delivers the most impressive performance of all as Dick Eklund, once “the pride of Lowell” but now destroyed by drug addiction and living a life torn by love for his brother and love for crack houses. Bale lost a lot of weight for the role and learned the exciteable mannerisms of an egotist consumed by addiction. And yet, Dick may be the most genuine person in the movie in regard to his love for Micky. Both their mother, Alice (Melissa Leo in an Oscar winning performance as a hot-headed untactful matriarch) and Micky’s father (Jack McGee), seem to be at least equally interested in continuing the family legacy as they are for Micky’s success.

A girl named Charlene comes along offering an alternative voice of hope, though Micky’s family greets her with all the hostility reserved for an intruder. Like most women who work at a bar, Charlene puts up a wall to block lecherous creeps, but softens up for Micky and encourages him to follow his own path. At least superficially (because Charlene is a softy at heart), this is a departure for Amy Adams, though by now it shouldn’t be surprising that she can pull off just about anything.

The Fighter plays things safe, though, and one can’t help feel slightly cheated. For instance, after the heated cat-fights between Alice and Charlene, the two are seen casually discussing the prognosis of Micky’s climactic fight as if they had been a family all along, a gradual reconciliation never even hinted up until then. It’s a mutual acceptance arrived at without an explanation of what dissolved the bitterness between the two most important women in the boxer’s life.

That is the fundamental shortcoming of The Fighter, becoming especially obvious in the end. There is little, if any, build up to each emotional benchmark. We are supposed to cheer Micky’s victory and yet the road to such a response was faulty at best.

Part of it, undoubtedly is due to the erratic editing, costing in style from documentary to Hollywood saga. Indeed, the framework is a documentary within the drama being filmed by HBO. Dick, in his delusional gaze believes it to be about his return, but in reality is about crack addiction, the movie’s sad joke. But the cinéma vérité nature of the cutting extends past its point killing the emotive impact in a way Russell likely did not intend.

Until the last one, the fights lack punch, though this may be because boxing may be only the venue for larger statements; statements undermined by the willy-nilly shifting of gears. Juxtaposition in moods can be done well and is often in itself the statement. But Russell doesn’t control the way he jumps from humor to melodrama. Take, for instance, the scene in which Alice and the band of sisters storm over to Charlene’s house, overloading the car, arriving at her doorstep where a brawl breaks out, catching the attention of a nosy neighbor.

It’s hard to read the scene. It seems played for laughs with the overfilled cars driving haywire, knocking down trash cans as it zigzags down the street and the stunned look at the neighbor is supposed to be our que to join him in voyeuristic amusement, but Russell then asks us to take the lead up and resolutions (Charlene finally sucker punches one of the loud-mouth sisters) seriously.  While Russell’s music is generally good in this movie, it dresses up the scene in unwarranted exhilaration that only mutes the significance of what transpires.

The Fighter has all the right parts; a story that, however familiar, is proven to work, great performances, and wit. Whalberg, who produced the movie, certainly had big aspirations for it.

“If it ain’t gonna be like Raging Bull, then it ain’t worth doing,” he told the press. “These guys, they have the story. Their lives are incredible. The things that they went through, and the things that they overcame and endured. It’s one of those amazing stories that I hope I get an opportunity to tell in my career. It’s going to be one of them gems.”

 But it was assembled with little thought or care. For a movie that was meant to be, and could have been, stirring, The Fighter is notably hard to respond to.