IN A scene depicted in The Fighter, a fat-cat boxing promoter makes Micky Ward an offer that should have been hard to refuse: come to Vegas. Train year-round, all expenses paid.
Implicit in this generous offer is that the promoter, who is plainly based on Bob Arum, can see what is obvious to everyone else, including the audience, save Irish Micky, ie, if he hopes to revive a career in tatters he needs to get himself out of Lowell, Massachusetts, and cut his ties with a family that includes a leech of a mother who functions as his “manager” and a drug-addled buffoon of an older brother who purports to be his trainer.
“But what about my brother?” frets Mark Wahlberg, who portrays Ward. “He’s taught me everything I know. I can’t do it without him.”
Although it was shot in what may have been a modern-day record 33 days, The Fighterwas nearly five years in the making. Somewhere along the way Brad Pitt, who was to have portrayed Ward's brother-cum-trainer Dickie Ecklund, opted out and was replaced by Christian (Batman) Bale. As what may be a further indication of the chaos attending the metamorphosis of the film, the credits include no fewer than 13 producers, executive producers and co-producers, while five individuals are credited with the story and screenplay.
The result of this screenplay-by-committee is a jumbled mélange of a film which can't decide whether it wants to be an updated retelling of Rockyor a particularly ugly episode of Intervention. The Fighteris described as "based on a true story", but any fears the Hollywood treatment would sanitise or sugar-coat its subject matter are quickly disabused by a warts-and-all portrayal of a dysfunctional family with more warts than a nest full of horned toads.
Bale’s Dickie is a bug-eyed nincompoop, an ex-fighter who once scored a somewhat dubious knockdown of Sugar Ray Leonard, but whose vision of reality is now so distorted he thinks a HBO crew has come to Lowell to film a documentary about his “comeback”. (The HBO crew is actually making a series on “Crack in America”, with Dickie a cautionary example of what can happen when drugs have removed every trace of common sense from a deluded soul.)
Alice Ward (Melissa Leo) doesn't come off much better. A mother no son (save perhaps Dickie) could love, Micky's mother is presented as such a selfish, venal matriarch she could be Fagin in drag. When she's not stage-mothering Micky and indulging Dickie, Alice presides over a flock of daughters – big-haired, gum-chewing, chain-smoking, foul-mouthed small-town bimbos. This inseparable – and indistinguishable – gaggle of slovenly crones serves the approximate function of the witches in Macbeth.
His sensitivity notwithstanding, Wahlberg’s blindly obedient Micky is somehow too confused to realise his family has become a millstone around his neck. His girlfriend, Charlene (Amy Adams), runs somewhat against type: she doesn’t want Micky to quit boxing; she just wants him to do it without Alice and Dickie.
That the only remotely sympathetic character besides Micky and Charlene is Sgt Mickey O’Keefe, the kind-hearted Lowell policeman who trains Micky whenever Dickie’s off at the crack-house, is unsurprising, since he is played by Sgt Mickey O’Keefe, the only figure, apart from Sugar Ray Leonard in a cameo, to portray himself in the film.
But the real problem with The Fighterisn't so much that it couches itself in the trappings of a reality TV series, but that, having established those parameters, it goes wildly off the rails with its wilful misrepresentation of reality.
The offer from the promoter who is not Bob Arum serves as a dramatic device triggering a sequence of events in which the conflicted fraternal relationship (as well as the misunderstood Dickie’s criminal career) are conveniently distilled into a single evening consuming less than five heavy-handed on-screen minutes.
In an apparently earnest attempt to match the offer from the promoter who is not Arum, Dickie first tries to assemble a consortium of investors from among the immigrant relations of Karen, his crack-house girlfriend. Rebuffed in his efforts to raise the money honourably, Dickie resorts to a goofy shakedown scheme: togged out as a streetwalker, Karen (portrayed by the aptly-named Chantyl Sok) gets herself picked up by a john, whom she is in the process of servicing in the front seat of his car when Dickie and another junkie show up, lights flashing, identify themselves as policemen, and, over the owner’s vague protests, announce their intention to impound his vehicle. The dope-ravaged masterminds are in the process of toting up the contents of the citizen’s wallet when, announced by more flashing lights, the real cops arrive.
Dickie takes off, leading the constabulary on a high-speed foot-chase across Lowell, straight to the restaurant where Micky and Charlene are dining. When he sees the cops beating the stuffing out of Dickie, Micky attempts to intervene but is quickly overpowered. One of the policemen, recognising him as a fighter, deliberately smashes his right hand with a nightstick. The brothers spend the night in jail. The next morning Micky is released on his own recognisance while Dickie, by virtue of his 27 previous arrests, is packed off to prison.
In real life, the episode with the nightstick did happen, pretty much as described, but it took place well before the mid-90s time-frame of the film. And while Ecklund was a guest of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts on several occasions during this period, the eight months of a 10-to-15 year stretch (for armed robbery) at the Billerica House of Correction depicted in The Fighteroccurred in 1999.
More to the point, beyond allowing Micky to hoist his bandaged paw and shout “is this what I should thank you for?” as Dickie is led out of the courthouse in chains, the nightstick episode serves utterly no dramatic purpose.
In production notes distributed at a New York screening this week, one of the film’s producers, Ryan Kavanaugh, summarises his brief to director David Russell: “We told him to keep the heart and soul, but that we needed some Rocky out of it.” Therein lies the rub.
The legacy of the real Micky Ward is that of a blue-collar boxer who achieved enduring respect despite never having won a world title. His trilogy of bouts against Arturo Gatti may eventually put him in the Hall of Fame, even though he lost the last two of them (after winning a split decision in the first). In the Hollywood treatment, Ward’s stunning, come-from-behind knockout victory (with a body shot) over previously unbeaten Alfonso Sanchez in 1996 leads to an immediate world title shot against Shea Neary in London in what the production notes describe as “the shot of a lifetime”.
A decisive underdog, Micky once again gets hopelessly outboxed for seven rounds before scoring an eighth-round KO and riding off into the sunset. The Gatti fights are alluded to only in a scripted crawl just before the credits roll.
In actuality, the win over Sanchez did lead to an immediate title shot for Ward, who in 1997 fought Vince Phillips for the WBA junior welterweight title in Boston, and was stopped (on cuts) inside three rounds.
Micky’s bout against Neary came three years, eight fights and one Dick Ecklund prison stretch later, and the only “title” involved – the WBU 140lb belt – was so lightly regarded it was recognised only in certain boroughs of London.
For no apparent reason beyond sheer obstinacy, the film makes that 140lb fight a welterweight title bout and announces both fighters at 146lb. (Ward weighed 140lb, Neary 139lb.) Micky’s record going in is listed as 20-7. It was actually 34-9.
But it is neither The Fighter's disregard of the facts nor its hokey Hollywood ending that will baffle audiences, but rather the mixed message implicit in the denouement, a warm and fuzzy Micky-and-Dickie moment.
“I don’t get it,” the filmgoer will be asking himself. “Did Micky Ward win that fight because his scumbag brother was back in his corner? Or in spite of it?”
