Boxing standard

The scenery gets chewed, chomped and finally swallowed whole in The Fighter, David O. Russell's fact-based melodrama about Mickey Ward (Mark Wahlberg), an aging boxer with one last chance for a breakthrough, and his trainer/half brother Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale), a onetime opponent of Sugar Ray Leonard who fell off the boxing world radar and later became addicted to crack.

As the restless junkie Dicky, Bale sports a widow's peak and bald spot. He twitches his face and twists his body and all but begs someone to hand him an Oscar. Then again, Bale's got nothing on Melissa Leo, playing the controlling mother of the two men. With her frosted hair reaching to the heavens and a Boston accent as thick as wallpaper paste, she commands a brood of six daughters who constantly attempt to bully poor Mickey into submission.

How you react to The Fighter, in other words, depends entirely on your tolerance for watching well-paid Hollywood movie stars portray the dregs of the American underclass. My own tolerance for such things: not so high. As boxing melodramas go, this is an exceptionally well-made one; the fight scenes, with the camera pushed up close to the performers' bodies, are handled with particular urgency. But not much else about The Fighter rings true, starting with the fact that Wahlberg is nearly 10 years too old to be playing the scrappy Ward.

Set in the early 1990s, as HBO was filming a documentary on crack addiction and using Dicky as one of its featured subjects, the screenplay (credited to four writers) presents a familiar sports movie conundrum: Will Mickey stick by his half brother and mother, who for years have guided his career, or finally heed the advice of his father (Jack McGee) and new girlfriend (Amy Adams, in a push-up bra and her own long-voweled accent) and seize opportunity when it's placed before him?

One guess as to how this all turns out -- but along the way we're treated to a series of half-caricatured, half-amusing episodes featuring Mickey and Dicky's shrill family, including their six half sisters, played by a group of unknowns who all look like they've seen the wrong end of a bar stool in their day. As the characters shout and overemote at each another, the movie comes to resemble one of Mike Leigh's more cartoonish studies of the British working class, like Life Is Sweet or All or Nothing, grafted onto a triumph-of-the-underdog tale like Rocky or Rudy. It's an awkward fit.

The best thing about The Fighter turns out to be Wahlberg, who, despite being three years older than Bale, whose Dicky is supposed to be seven years older than Mickey, maintains a core of low-key dignity in the face of so much soap opera. Mickey is repeatedly pitted against much larger and more skilled fighters, and each time he triumphs. No one seems more surprised than Mickey himself.

It's an affecting study of an athlete wracked with doubt but somehow capable of digging deeper.

The actor reminds us that, in a loudmouth spectacle like The Fighter, a little bit of subtlety goes a long way.