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The Fighter
A number of people have argued The Fighter, now out on DVD, is decent but underwhelming, a get-out-of-jail-semi-free card for a filmmaker in dire need of commercial success. "David O. Russell is wasting his crazy talent on movies like The Fighter," ran a headline for Dan Kois" dispatch during this year"s Slate Movie Club. "Is this really the kind of movie we want our David O. Russells directing?" he asked. "Any competent welterweight could punch his way through this story." The answer"s ambivalent: do you want pure self-expression, or do you want the classical auteurist game of teasing out a director"s personality through a product that initially seems reasonably generic?
The idea that The Fighter is business as usual, helmed a little more vigorously, is a little silly. If The Fighter looks standard-issue, that"s only compared to Russell"s prior confrontational, oft-outre movies. Though technically working from someone else"s script - four credited writers, to be precise - Russell told Sight & Sound"s James Bell that he reworked the film "in a direction that was quite different from what I inherited." The two big changes from formula that got everyone"s attention: the Greek chorus of seven sisters that haunt boxer Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) at every turn - not so much a real group of women as a gaggle of unison-speaking/thinking harridans, acting as overt comic relief - and the omission of Ward"s final fights, his brutal rock-em-sock-em three rounds against Arturo Gatti.