Thanks, I Hate It: The Fighter

There is exactly one interesting shot in David O. Russell’s The Fighter. In it, Mark Wahlberg’s emotionally stunted mama’s boy character speaks to his mother over a corded landline, the cord to which snakes along behind him like a newborn’s umbilicus as she digs her claws ever deeper into his psyche. Everything other than single potent image is roughly equivalent to modern office park decor, dryly functional and with an institutional air to it. It’s fitting, because The Fighter is a fucking jail sentence of a movie. It’s interminable, emotionless, and far too true to its middling real world inspiration to say anything worth listening to.

The boxing scenes which drive the story are utterly devoid of artistry, bland shaky cam slogs with no sense of where the fighters are putting their weight, of what each impact feels like, of anything at all beyond the fact that boxing is occurring. Put it next to Scorsese’s Raging Bull, an unavoidable comparison for any American boxing movie, and see how that earlier film follows the flow of muscles under skin, sometimes with terrifying speed, sometimes with fluid slowness. The Fighter’s bouts, while aiming for a sort of jittery liveliness, come off as clinical and distant. There is no sense of immediacy to them.

The film’s emotional tone is similarly constipated. Even Christian Bale’s turn as small-time boxing champ turned manic, crack-addicted joke is too shallow to amount to much. The characters yell at each other as a substitute for actual drama, ratcheting up the volume whenever Russell wants to make some kind of emotional point. The result is deadening rather than heightening, and from Bale’s character’s time in prison to Wahlberg’s ascent through the ranks of heavyweight boxing not a single arc finds the slightest bit of human resonance. It all feels like the movie’s marking time.

The Fighter, nominated for seven Oscars, is in many ways a perfect example of the kind of art Hollywood rewards. It is unambitious, visually blank, and centered on men succeeding and failing in the clear-cut way only sports can afford them. In attempting to find the tragedy and triumph of lives which began in poverty and spiraled off in two wildly different directions it instead betrays its creator’s total lack of insight into the lives of its subjects, and perhaps something of the subjects’ own lack of insight into their own selves. It is a film shot through a foot of see-through emotional insulation and tedious to the core.