DVD reviews: The Fighter | Never Let Me Go
THE Fighter is fast becoming my favourite film of the year. David O Russell's vibrant biopic of Clinton-era welterweight contender "Irish" Micky Ward is so punch-drunk with passion, pride, and the emotional pugilism of its supporting cast of hellions, it feels like a brand-new type of boxing movie. Mixing the feel-good uplift of Rocky with the feel-bad realism of Raging Bull, Russell had made a film that's playfully subversive: an underdog sport movie that makes a mockery of small-town decency, couches its inspirational speeches in crack-induced crazy talk, and focuses on telling the story of a hero considered to be an embarrassment, and an embarrassment considered to be a hero. The former is Micky Ward (Wahlberg), a big-hearted big hitter who has acquired a ringside rep in his hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts as a stepping-stone slugger. The latter is his elder half-brother Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale), a former boxer known as the "Pride of Lowell" who despite becoming a wild-eyed crack addict, can do no wrong in the eyes of their monstrous mother/manager Alice (Melissa Leo). Leo and Bale won Oscars for the roles this year and deservedly so. Russell also draws on his previous descents into family dysfunction with indie hits Spanking the Monkey and Flirting with Disaster to ensure The Fighter remains grounded and blackly funny. Like Micky's "head/body/head" boxing strategy, it strikes a blow for film that engages on a cerebral and a gut level.
Never Let Me Go
Fox, 19.99
Never Let Me Go, on the other hand, works mainly on cerebral level, though that's no bad thing. Chilly and austere, it's a suitably haunting adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's acclaimed dystopian novel. Set in a subtly altered version of postwar Britain, it's the story of Kathy (Carey Mulligan), Tommy (Andrew Garfield) and Ruth (Keira Knightley), three friends who meet as children in the 1970s in a strange boarding school: a kind of hermetic environment in which teachers prepare their charges for the outside world while buffering them against its realities. The reasons for this peculiar treatment are gradually divulged and, while the actual twist is easily guessable, the film's power comes from the way it reveals its exact nature from the nave perspective of its three protagonists. Director Mark Romanek keeps things low-key and desperately sad.
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