Fourth in the Short Responses To Things You Must See Series
It’s rare to find a film where the heart is in the cast of supporting characters and not the lead. But that’s exactly what you will find in David O. Russell’s boxing drama The Fighter [2010]. This is not to begrudge the talent of Mark Wahlberg who has shown us before that he has the acting chops to carry a picture. He was gloriously cocky in Paul Thomas Anderson’s porn epic Boogie Nights [1997], and scintillatingly angry in Martin Scorsese’s The Departed [2006]. His boxer (named Mickey) in Russell’s film is of a placid sort, but it provides the necessary blank slate for his character: a man whose life is in control of others around him. And the “others” of course are tornados: there’s Amy Adam’s feisty girlfriend, Christian Bale’s crackhead coach brother, and most of all, Melissa Leo’s monstrously controlling mother whose acridity is symbolized by the stiff immovability of her hairdo.
They all want to have the biggest say in Mickey’s career choices, and for so long he has followed the harebrained maneuverings of his mother who acts as his manager, and suffers the shenanigans of his unprofessional brother–who is a boxing genius, a one-time local legend (he reputedly once TKO’d Sugar Ray Leonard), if only he could get away from crack. Disasters follow one after the other, until he gets a forced enlightenment, courtesy of a girl who calls a spade a spade, and sees that Mickey’s greatest liability as a boxer is his toxic family. And so now this is the real boxing story of the film: not the fights in the ring, although that’s fairly represented, but in the arduous decision of our indecisive hero–who do you follow? your family who seems blindly bent on your ruin? or other people?
Mr. Bale is a force to be reckoned with in this film, and it might as well be his as a lead role and not Mr. Wahlberg’s. His Dicky, in fact, is a co-lead more than anything else. He does his usual physical stunt of thinning himself for a role again–a yo-yo-ing weight manipulation he has already done numerous times, such as in Brad Anderson’s chilling The Machinist [2004], Mary Harron’s murderous 80s satire American Psycho [2000], Werner Herzog’s Rescue Dawn [2006], as well as in Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies. Ms. Adams turns in a performance that defy with delicious wildness the other landmark roles in her resume–a Disney princess, a doubting nun, a food blogger, a Southern chatterbug. But it is Ms. Leo’s mother with whom the screen almost staggers with such malevolent power. She is the undisputed queen of a family that is scary in that loutish, white-trash kind of way. Her monster mom makes me shiver, because I know people just like her: people who are strangely invested in cultivating the failure of people who love them. I cringed in every scene that she was in. To have that kind of screen presence, you had to hand it to Ms. Leo’s acting prowess, last glimpsed in Courtney Hunt’s powerful Frozen River [2008], for which she was nominated for Best Actress in the Oscars. But how we loath her character. And how wonderful that is.
Here is a dramedy of such compelling believability and heart, spurred by some of the greatest, most nuanced performances by any Hollywood actor last year. I came away from its screening in the University of Iowa campus with that glowing affirmation that I have just seen greatness — and it is just a little bit too bad that not a lot of people would be watching it, given its premise. The premise is this: a lesbian couple and their two teenage children, both inseminated from the same sperm donor, deal with the upheaval of his abrupt arrival into their lives. The complications and the drama I would not elaborate in this space, but the minutae of their dilemma and the ways with which they try to seek an impasse are handled with such delicate fluency by director Cholodenko, who clearly knows what she wants to do with this story and how to frame it. There is not one false note in this film, and the necessary chemistry of its stars–including the slowly tattering connection between Annette Bening and Julianne Moore who play the couple–are spot-on and subtle. Mark Ruffalo pulls off his role as the gentle, if bumbling, interloper with such fine balance (he makes sloppy decisions, but we can’t hate him). He does this with such convincing thoroughness that I know he will be overlooked once again in the race for acting awards this year. Why? His acting is so good, he disappears and just becomes. And Oscar, of course, seems to always bet on the showy. (Think Christian Bale in The Fighter and Natalie Portman in Black Swan.)
Ms. Moore is given a devastating monologue in the end that gives us goosebumps as she tallies the difficulties of love and marriage, but it is Ms. Bening who steals the movie. She steals it in a peculiar way, because while we are watching the film, she seems to come and go in stealth. And yet, when the movie ends, it is her performance you remember the most. Take note of the dinner scene, where she lets her obsessive-compulsive self go with a Joni Mitchell song.
Take note of the sequence right after that — no words, just silence, and just a close-up of her face as she processes a terrible discovery. Those few minutes of just her face is a masterclass in acting. She deserves an Oscar for that scene alone.
And yet I seem to paint the entire film as something quite serious. It is. But it is also a very, very funny film, a riot in fact. And it is that perfect juggling act between comedy and drama that makes this film feel true and feel emotionally resonant–the way The Social Network probably does not do, even with all its technical flourish. This is a film to love, especially for what it says about modern families. And especially for the performances in it that are more than all right, they’re golden.
