Fighter

How did Mark Wahlberg feel at the Oscar ritual in 2011? His male co-star (Christian Bale) was nominated for Best Supporting Actor, and won. His two female leads were nominated for Best Supporting Actress (Melissa Leo won, beating Amy Adams). Wahlberg wasn't nominated for his title role of The Fighter, but he will have been cheered up by the thought that he did share the Best Motion Picture nomination as a producer. He should be laughing all the way to the bank: his US$25 million boxing drama grossed five times as much globally by March 2011, with DVD income still to be added.

His credited co-producers included the film project's original director, Darren Aronofsky (also chasing fame and fortune the same year as director of Black Swan) and the ubiquitous Weinstein brothers (whose distribution/PR work for the more successful The King's Speech earned them even more).

Hollywood is a small world, and Wahlberg will have been glad that he ended up working a third time with director David O. Russell (following Three Kings in 1999, alongside George Clooney, and I Heart Huckabees in 2004). Russell gained an Oscar nomination, as did the movie's original screenplay (from a quartet of re-writers) and editing (Pamela Little Miss Sunshine Martin).

Wahlberg, playing world welterweight champion Micky Ward (a real-life Rocky) did earn a Golden Globe acting nomination, and shared several US movie critics associations' acting ensemble nominations (and some wins) with Bale (as Dicky Eklund, the fighter's elder half-brother and failed boxer), Adams (Ward's female interest) and Jack (TV's Rescue Me) McGee and Leo as Micky's Boston-Irish parents. It could also have included Mickey O'Keefe, playing himself in a convincingly understated way as the fighter's part-time trainer and real-time local policeman. Ward's mother was his monstrously egocentric manager, and the coven of seven daughters who backed her up look like a screenwriter's comic fantasy until you find out they really did exist in the fighter's manic family life.

As he did for The Mechanist and Rescue Dawn, Bale starved himself into an angular angsty character, adding the bulging-eyed facial tics and twitchy body mannerisms of a crack addict, to capture the gait and goofy character of Eklund. He dominates every scene he's in, and it's fascinating to imagine how Brad Pitt or Matt Damon would have played the role (for which they were Wahlberg's first and second signings).

Wahlberg, from a similar background as Ward, presents a nice-guy fighter who's too good to be true, too sweet to be a prize-fighter, too straightforward to have the same blood as his despicably trashy mother and siblings. One has to assume his niceness was passed down from his amenable father (as portrayed by McGee), whose willingness to stay with Leo's scenery-chewing domineering wife/mother-from-hell is hard to believe.

Before the end credits, Russell shows a few minutes of the real-life half-brothers in a farewell setting for the film crew, leaving his audience to admire the impersonations of reality conjured up by Wahlberg and Bale. Admirable too was Adams, putting on weight and stretching her acting range even further, as the fighter's spirited girlfriend. They and Leo should feel lucky that Russell is an actor's director. He eschewed visual flourishes, recreating decades-old HBO documentary styles and opting for brutal unromanticised fight sequences, above all letting his actors and their crisp dialogue tell the good old-fashioned story the best Hollywood way possible, in terms of ordinary people.