THE FIGHTER is About Way More Than Boxing

The true story about welter-weight boxer "Irish" Micky Ward as captured in a riveting movie, The Fighter, is definitely not a story about boxing.

Yes, there is plenty of footage of boxing activity: Micky (Mark Wahlberg) training, Micky sparring, Micky getting the snot beaten out of him. There is enough violence and gore to satisfy any ravenous fan of humanity's most confounding sport. I have never been able to figure out why any man or woman would willingly enter an elevated, mis-named "ring," wearing gigantic leather mittens loaded with padding, to face an identically equipped person of the same size and gender for the purpose of striking one another until one is either knocked unconscious or is too slap happy to continue.

The Fighter, more than anything else, provides answers to that question.

Lowell, Massachusetts, where Micky and his large Irish family reside, provides a bleak backdrop for the antics of Micky's family of six half-siblings, his hen-pecked father, and a mother who puts the "bitch" into the word ambitchious.

Micky's older half-brother, Dicky Eklund (an emaciated Christian Bale) had once been known as The Pride of Lowell for his boxing career that spanned 10 years in the 1980s and 90s. His biggest claim to fame? Going the distance with the great Sugar Ray Leonard in 1978, only to lose in a unanimous decision. Eklund later succumbed to his intractable crack cocaine addiction, and was sentenced to 10-15 years in prison for an array of concurrent crimes.

The Fighter uses the story of Micky Ward's journey through his own career to peel the layers of the onion known as family dynamics in a working class, unsophisticated and hard-scrabble environment.

A young boy, raised in the shadow of his larger-than-life, charismatic brother, who is the son of another man, becomes the sparring partner of that older brother and learns the sport in the process.

In the midst of his success, Dicky Eklund becomes hooked on crack and the crime required to feed his habit. His career is destroyed, but he retains his inflated ego, blown even larger by the drugs.

Dicky and their mother, Alice (Melissa Leo,) connive and cajole until Micky agrees to pursue his own career in the ring. But Micky is constantly caught between his love for his sadly comical family and his feeling of being used and betrayed, of always coming in second to The Pride of Lowell.

Also front and center in this film is the hard-edged culture of that one-time mill town called Lowell. An occasional peace breaks out among the family brawls, street fights and verbal one-upsmanship, while the family matriarch battles Micky's girlfriend Charlene (Amy Adams) for primary influence.

Director David O. Russell does a masterful job of pulling the audience into Micky Ward's corner. Eventually, love and determination to do things on his own terms prevail and this writer was throwing phantom punches in her theater seat.

I predict at least three Academy Award nominations.