They both deal with men in a time of crisis who are then helped by another man and woman. Both have problems with their siblings. Both are triumphant.
But that is more or less where the similarities end.
Their differences are that the former is English and the latter American, the first about royalty and the second about commoners, The King's Speech a little like a filmed play and The Fighter by those who understand that you can make magic with the right people, pictures and sound.
JG Ballard rejected being given a CBE, dismissing it as a "Ruritanian charade", but you are not going to persuade royalists that people can solve their problems without the help of a small group of people who generally do very little and talk with plummy accents.
So, apart from all that, is the film any good? Well, it wouldn't be nominated for an Oscar if it were altogether bad and Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush give absolutely flawless and touching performances.
Helena Bonham Carter, too, gives a finer performance than the loyal, supporting wife she's portrayed as in the trailer. To a non-royalist, she comes across as a lively, astute and accurate portrayal of the woman we used to see in newsreels and Firth in an interview said took 186 years to die.
Interestingly, there is a kind of geopolitical subtext to this story in that an American, Wallace Simpson, leads to the abdication of the king and a failed, lowly Australian actor, leads to his triumph. That Rush's Logue comes from Perth, which is now one of the wealthiest new districts in the Commonwealth, is a very timely coincidence indeed.
In fact, the film also holds up an unsettling mirror to Kiwi society, which on the one hand can't quite bring itself to let go of the distant mother (is)land, whereas on the other it embraces American culture just up to that point where it might get too loud.
But there are dull spots in the slower-than-its-trailer film, especially - and oddly - with Michael Gambon, playing George's overbearing father. The scene doesn't seem as well oiled as most of the other scenes are, many of which are long and some of which occasionally border on becoming a tad boring.
That fine composer, Alexandre Desplat, has been nominated for an Oscar, but his music from the dire Birth and Roman Polanski's excellent The Ghost Writer was much better - and it doesn't help that when the king of England tells his nation that they must brace for war, it is a German composer's sublime music - the immortal allegretto from Beethoven's Seventh Symphony - that fills out that speech.
Still, it's a very beautiful film, with great performances and it should at least get an Oscar for best actor.
The Fighter reminded me of sitting in a Swiss festival cinema about eight years ago and seeing a film by an Australian, Eddie Edwards, who'd been living in South Africa for a decade. I can't remember its title but it was a documentary about a black boxer from the Crossroads squatter camp in Cape Town and his low-class Afrikaans trainer.
The boxer had to win to feed his family and, it being about South Africa at one of those human rights kind of fests, I was expecting the worst. But the boxer won! And his white trainer and I laughed! Through tears! Agh!
Well, that's the kind of film The Fighter is. Golden Globe winner Christian Bale's Dicky Eklund takes you by the scruff of the neck and drags you into this lowlife boxing story and before you know it you're in love with his half-brother, Micky Ward, his girlfriend, their streetsmart Momma, her seven ugly daughters, the works.
Wahlberg's Micky slowly emerges as somewhat screwed up but always dignified. It is one of the greatest "quiet" roles played in a long time, but then he's been nominated for a producer's Oscar, since this has been his baby for a long time.
Charlene, the barmaid Micky falls in love with, played straight down the line by Amy Adams, is perfect. Her catfight on the porch with one of the sisters is almost as feral as Faye Dunaway's in Barfly, with which this film shares a great deal of addiction humour. Alice, Micky's mother, played by an unrecognizable-from-the-Homicide: Life-on-the-Streets-series Melissa Leo, is painfully on the money, peroxided hairdo and all.
She and Adams clearly deserve their nominations.
The Fighter does what a motion picture is supposed to do: it moves. It doesn't just move the action, it moves our heads and hearts in ways that are neither soppy nor royal, showing just how messy (and funny) things can get when you mix family and business, athletics and drugs.
If The King's Speech is a royalist film, then The Fighter is a people's film.
There was one moment when Wahlberg wanted to put his head against a doorpost to signify dejection. You can actually see him rejecting the notion, and that is what this film is about: avoiding every acting and boxing-film cliche you can conjure up. Unless you're a boxing historian or fanatic, you really don't know what's going to happen at the end.
If there is one minuscule criticism then it is that Dicky has his moment of rehabilitation - which for a junkie usually means admission, art or, in this case, Jesus - too briefly, and in silhouette. We needed to see his eyes receiving "the light", but the reason why he won that Globe and should get the big one is because for the first time one of his many lizard-like characters is ablaze with his illusions, failures and hopes.
In short, he is passionately human.
Neil Sonnekus
*Next week I'll review one of the Oscar contenders for best actress, Black Swan.
** Since I'll be publishing on Friday 25 February anyway - that is, two days before the Oscar evening - I'll be giving my predictions and wish list, which are like chalk and cheese. Please feel free to do so, too.
No comments:
Post a Comment