I’ve had a love affair for a while with boxing and fighting, with the exquisite single-mindedness, the ultimate distilling of everything, your entire life, down to a second-by-second battle against one single opponent. It’s the opposite of how life really is, and yet the intensity of the focus is amazing. Also the intensity of the training, the will, the channeling of body and mind. It’s the ultimate metaphor and also beyond all metaphors. Calling it a chess match or a brawl is just wrong. A fight is always a fight.
So I went to see The Fighter today to take my mind off that other, deadlier violence, and I loved it for its ability to understand that focus as well as to draw in all the other parts of a life that you have to, for those minutes in the ring, absolutely forget about.
It wasn’t entirely without its problems, the movie, there were some things played for laughs that I was vaguely offended by, but it managed to avoid being the Heartwarming True Story Of A Man And His Family Finding Reconciliation And A Title Bout. It left me teetering at the end, in the fear that it all fell apart right after that moment in the ring. Or rather, knowing that one moment doesn’t make it all OK.
I’ve been the Amy Adams character in real life—been the girl who walked with her man to the ring and screamed herself hoarse on the sidelines, wanted to look away maybe when he hit the canvas but forced herself to look and to know that this was what he wanted, needed, had to do. I remember how it felt to be swept up into his sweatysore arms after a win.
I never got in the ring myself, but I practiced and sparred and more than once left everything that hurt me behind on a heavybag, in sweat and curses on the ground behind me.
I love it for a working-class sport (and a working-class film, certainly, and Marky Mark for never, ever forgetting his roots—those Boston boys do me right every time) and one that deserves far more of a reputation for a thinker’s sport than it has.
And I loved Christian Bale, once again, as a man who watched his chances go up in a puff of smoke and slowly has to accept responsibility for them, for himself, for the lost selfishness he’s allowed his hurt to become.
The Fighter is, after all, the wrong title for the movie. Though boxing always comes down to two people in a ring, you’re never fully alone there and this is a movie about all the people you need to have in your corner to make it, and how one person’s win can belong to a whole family.
