The Fighter

A film that has no control on tone and that has the attention span of the main characters watching Fernando Trueba's Oscar-winner "Belle Epoque" (read: none at all), "The Fighter" is an unsuccessful hybrid of different ideas, styles, and sensibilities. Why anyone thought David O. Russell, the filmmaker of "I Heart Huckabees," "Three Kings," and "Flirting With Disaster" should be associated with a sports film, much less a movie about boxing, is way beyond me. It's a miscalculation that plays out sloppily, as the film is wrongly tinged with Russell's quirky flourishes. At the same time, he overall gets rid of his previous directorial mindset, so that the film is a result of him being stuck between gears, when he should have gone one way or the other.

If you don't know the background of the making of this film, you may be a little hard pressed to explain the film's biggest mistake: the focus being put on Mickey Ward, not on his brother Dicky Eklund. The film, in its confused intentions, still covers Ward and Eklund on the same level, but it would be substantially better if it just looked at the unreliable, cocaine-addicted Dicky. Since Mark Wahlberg's persistence was apparently the reason "The Fighter" got made at all, it makes sense that he would put himself front and center and chose the character that a) he thought (fallaciously) was more intriguing or b) he looked more like to base the movie around. However, that hardly warrants the film, which, ultimately, was not really worth making, no matter who the lead was.

The beginning of the movie is a strange meta-film, as HBO documentarians come to Lowell, MA to ostensibly shoot the comeback of Eklund (Christian Bale), who is famed for supposedly knocking out Sugar Ray Robinson (when Robinson probably just tripped). In the periphery is Mickey, who is training to get some fights. There is no sense of how long Mickey has fought or anything like that, as that would just be pesky exposition. (No one but stuck-up cinephiles who like "Belle Epoque" needs that stuff.) We do know that he hasn't been in top form recently (he's collected notice as a "stepping stone"), and that he needs a nice and easy fight to regain footing. He has one slotted, but it turns out that the guy gets sick, someone else steps in, and Mickey gets routed. Such is his luck, we assume.

The people of Lowell are supposedly ashamed of his losing reputation, but the film doesn't manage to make you think that Mickey is truly ostracized. We get more of a sense that his family (notably his mother, played by Melissa Leo) disapproves of his "MTV" girlfriend (Amy Adams), which further underlines how the film is not really about boxing. It's more about talking about and preparing for it, which is a good part of why the film is boring.

I found this film a waste of two hours that could have been improved with some switcheroos (directional, directorial, etc.). It's worth avoiding just for the unintentionally soul-destroying, hard-to-watch scene when Bale and Leo sing one of those "duets for old times" with "I Started a Joke." Plus because my friend, a Massachusetts native, says that Leo's accent (as well as the, to use his words, "self-parodic" view of New England) is somewhat of a disgrace. Her performance in my view is cartoonish, to be sure, but also pretty solid. Bale is good but not exceptional in his drugged out exaggeration, and Adams is alright, a moderate factor. I agree with Roger Ebert: Wahlberg, with a mediocre performance lacking in charisma, lets the film down. The notes he hits of anguish are valuable and heartrending, but since those are few and far between, a recast would have been a good idea. "The Fighter," with no modifications made, is one of the weakest contenders in the 2010 Oscar field. C

The King's Speech

Tom Hooper's "The King's Speech," on the strength of blasting out of both Toronto (Audience Award minted) and Telluride, is making a serious push for the crown of Best Picture. A win there to me would seem a bit unfair. It is a film with a disconnected narrative and ideas, that becomes groaningly hokey, tiresome, and cliched when it continues to overplay many a moment in its second half with its cloying score. This is not to suggest that this film does not work at all. It is a very visually arresting film, which is surprising for a period picture. And, most importantly, in it Colin Firth gives the best performance of his career and Geoffrey Rush does quality work as well.

Firth plays the man who would become King George VI, who cannot speak with the proficiency that someone in his position is required to have. He fails in his first public appearance as the Duke of York, and the need for assistance becomes more evident than ever. The only problem is that he's gotten abrasive towards those therapists who have to help him, and, with his lack of patience and the doctors' inability to get him to keep going, he feels that his ailment is impossible to fix.

His wife, soon-to-be Queen Elizabeth (an underutilized, very good Helena Bonham Carter), goes without telling him to one more speech therapist. This is Lionel Logue (Rush), who has his office in a dank and abstractly wallpapered basement. Logue writes her off at first, falling under the impression (due to the alias used) that this is just another case. However, in what develops into a sort of running joke, Elizabeth reveals who she actually is and Logue comes to take George on.

Logue has the audacity that the other doctors lacked. He insists on staying on a first-name basis with George (whom he incessantly calls Bertie, his family nickname) to have the intimacy that he finds necessary. He tries to find and use the points where George is able to avoid his stutter (when he cannot hear himself speaking, when he's singing, when he's swearing). And he, also prods George to a level that he's never been before, so much so that George considers Logue the "first normal friend" he's had.

While George is gaining this training for personal life (telling stories to his daughters) and smaller public appearances, it begins to become apparent that he might need it for something much larger. His prickly father George V (Michael Gambon) passes, and his womanizing brother Edward (Guy Pearce) becomes king but is taken by a love strong enough to marry (Wallis Simpson, portrayed by Eve Best). Which comes as a problem, seeing as she is a divorcee. So even though George doesn't have the ambition to be king, that comes to hardly matter.

As I noted earlier, the film has masterful visual stylism, with its unpredictable and palpable cinematography by Danny Cohen that is one of the year's highest technical achievements. The typical period sobriety is not what he's aiming for, although he does bounce off of some of the hallmarks of the genre. The camera is packed into a small elevator along with the king and queen; it follows George around as he rages or as he follows one of Logue's treatments; and it employs the architecture of the period in marvelous ways (it reminded me of Matyas Erdely's extraordinary work on "Tender Son: The Frankenstein Project"). It is the perfect compliment to Jenny Beaven's costumes, and a fabulous addition to the film as a whole.

Firth could also be called this. He plays George with an exceptional naturalness. He sometimes locks the film down, but in retrospect that's exactly the point. He plays the polar opposite of his rival in the awards competition, Jesse Eisenberg as the unusually breakneck Mark Zuckerberg. I found his work in last year's "A Single Man" rather overrated, but here he's getting deservedly lauded. I found Rush also suited his part, charmingly playing what may become one of his signature roles.

They are brought up and then let down by David Seidler's script, crafting an auspicious start and then a detrimentally sentimental followthrough. Even if most of the cogs in the machine are working, when one as big as this one goes down, the film is affected. Enough to make it a bore as it progresses and thus to hinder the course of a potentially top-notch film. B-