THE FIGHTER: A Film Review in the New York Review of Books

I came across a review of the film The Fighter in the New York Review of Books, 10 March 2011, and I pass some of that review on here for readers at this boxing forum. The Fighter is a 2010 biographical sports drama film directed by David O. Russell, and starring Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, Melissa Leo and Amy Adams.I’ve taken an interest in boxing since my teenage years with my dad in Canada when he joined the Baha’i Faith.-Ron Price, Tasmania

The Fighter is a portrayal of boxing as the public, professional, and singularly ugly face of what might be called the primal pathology of the human condition—the compulsion to fight, to subject oneself to injury and humiliation, matched with the hardly less perverse compulsion to witness such extremes of human endurance in a brutalized public place.

Is there a transcendent, bitter beauty to this grim sport, asks this American author of more than 50 books, Joyce Carol Oats(b. 1963-), rhetorically? The Fighter never suggests that boxing allows superior athletes to perform brilliantly and memorably? It’s traditional for boxers, especially young boxers in training, to study films of great fights under the tutelage of their trainers, and in this study, they acquire a reverence for past champions, as well as exemplary models to follow.

The Fighter is, if not a champion film for all time, a very good, poignant, and commendable expression of its era: post-industrial working-class urban America, bereft of history as it is bereft of jobs, strong unions, pride in one’s work. Lowell, Massachusetts, is the ideal setting for this modest fairy tale of an underdog who finally comes out on top—if but temporarily, and with what cost to him, no one quite knows or seems to care. Boxing may be cruel and pitiless to its most ardent practitioners, but bountiful to its gifted chroniclers.-Ron Price with thanks to Joyce Carol Oates, “The Camera at Ringside,” 10 March 2011, The New York Review of Books, 10 March 2011.