The Fight­er

Fun­ny thing, act­ing. When it’s good it goes unno­ticed. When it’s great it is laud­ed. But when it’s too good it can upset the apple­cart entire­ly. Take Chris­t­ian Bale in The Fight­er. He plays Dicky, a rake-thin for­mer box­er-turned-crack addict, and cur­rent wild­card train­er of baby broth­er and wel­ter­weight hope­ful Mick­ey Ward (Mark Wahlberg).

The lat­ter, a real-life Rocky arche­type from mid-’90s Low­ell, Mass­a­chu­setts, is the osten­si­ble sub­ject of this film, which charts his rise from emi­nent­ly beat­able wannabe, right through to world cham­pi­on pugilist, and all with sassy lover Char­lene (Amy Adams) in tow.

And yet, make no mis­take; the real sub­ject of the movie is Bale’s fra­ter­nal hor­ror show. Embrac­ing the weight loss that’s become emblem­at­ic of the ​‘seri­ous’ Bale per­for­mance (The Machin­ist, say, as opposed to The Dark Knight), and adding to this a sav­age thin­ning of his angu­lar pâté, the 36-year-old for­mer child actor is nowhere to be found on screen.

Instead, as Dicky repeat­ed­ly promis­es great­ness for Mick­ey but deliv­ers only cat­a­clysm (includ­ing some shock­ing­ly mis­matched fights, and a bru­tal beat­ing at the hands of some police heav­ies), what we get is a mes­meris­ing dis­play of bird-like twitch­es, bod­i­ly jerks and bug-eyed stares, often over­laid with thick Boston­ian pro­nounce­ments such as his open­ing state­ment, ​“I’m squir­rel­ly as fuck!”

In this rou­tine, Bale has found the rhythm of a charis­mat­ic crack addict: always on, always cen­tre-stage, always ready to per­form for any inquis­i­tive eyes.The first act inclu­sion of a cam­era crew from HBO, who are alleged­ly shoot­ing a doc­u­men­tary about Dicky’s down-and-out life in Low­ell, is a stroke of genius from direc­tor David O Rus­sell and writ­ers Scott Sil­ver, Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson.

For it allows Dicky the ide­al ever-present mir­ror against which he can enact the fan­ta­sy ver­sion of him­self (he relent­less­ly recounts the ancient sto­ry of the fight where, alleged­ly, he knocked down Sug­ar Ray Leonard), and it also per­mits Rus­sell to indulge in some suave Scors­ese-style for­mal shenani­gans at the start, with a long rolling track through the streets of Low­ell that sets up both the nar­ra­tive milieu and the dra­mat­ic ten­sion between Mickey’s restrained intro­ver­sion and Dicky’s inces­sant scene stealing.

And this, sure­ly, is the rub. For when act­ing becomes noth­ing short of trans­for­ma­tive fire­works – and it does so very rarely (think De Niro in Rag­ing Bull, or Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood) – it can be dis­tract­ing. The Fran­cophile film the­o­rist Gilbert Adair calls this ​‘watch­ing the effect of act­ing, rather than watch­ing act­ing itself.’ And cer­tain­ly there are moments in The Fight­er – with Bale, for instance, on full bulge in a crack den – when you’re struck by the thought that this just might be the best per­for­mance ever com­mit­ted to film. Or the worst.

Thank­ful­ly, how­ev­er, the ham­mer nev­er falls on either side. Rus­sell throws so much at the screen that there is lit­tle time to make your mind up. Instead, what you get is a for­mu­la­ic box­ing movie with some prim­i­tive gen­der-based stereo­types (skin­ny babes in black under­wear are good; plain fat girls in sweaters are bad), that is made utter­ly com­pelling by a sin­gle turn from one of the most com­mit­ted actors in the business.