Warrior

WARRIOR                  B                     

USA  (140 mi)  2011  ‘Scope  d:  Gavin O’Connor

While there’s nothing particularly novel about this formulaic story, a ROCKY (1976) picture with Nick Nolte in the famous Burgess Meredith role as the aging fight trainer, with the role of Rocky split between two brothers, Tom Hardy as Tommy and Joel Edgarton as Brendan, split from one another as teenagers and forced to lead very separate and distinctly different lives.  Hardy plays a brooding ex-Marine, a loner with so many complications in his life he can barely utter a word, a guy carrying a grudge who turns into a horrifically brutal fighter, while his brother Brandon is a high school physics teacher, married with two children, but about to have his home foreclosed, forcing him into a state of desperation where he can pick up extra cash from the fight business.  Joel Edgarton is the screenwriter of the very stylish The Postman Always Rings Twice style Australian film THE SQUARE (2008), directed by his brother Nash, and one of the criminal brothers in one of he best pictures of last year, ANIMAL KINGDOM (2010).  Here he plays the older brother who got the better end of the deal, as the younger brother was forced to flee from an abusive father, taking his terminally ill mother with him, basically fending for himself at an early age, losing all contact with his family.  Neither one has any use for their father, who finally after all these years is trying to get sober, but barely even registers as having a pulse with these two guys, as they’ve left him behind ages ago.  Rather than playing football in Mark Wahlberg’s INVINCIBLE (2006), wrestling from Aronofsky’s THE WRESTLER (2008 ), or boxing in David O. Russell’s THE FIGHTER (2010), this movie features the latest fighting craze called the ultimate fighting championship, mixed martial arts, which allows boxing, wrestling, and various martial arts techniques where a fighter wins by points, knockouts or submission holds, where in this case, a round robin battle of 16 leads to 4 fights within 24 hours, the winner takes all, a $5 million cash prize.  

While the actual narrative is familiar, but rather than shown in an indie style picture, which is usually all character development, this is a tense, highly stylized, Hollywood action picture that takes us directly into the center of the ring where it becomes an adrenaline-laced fight picture, an old-fashioned popcorn movie that stars three men who are so damaged they are barely articulate, who haven’t spoken to one another in years, and when they do have the opportunity, they still have next to nothing to say, so it’s all about what happens inside the ring.  Tommy is a former undefeated high school State wrestling champion, but his quick exit from the state curtailed his promising career, while Brendan had a brief, fairly ordinary ultimate fighting career that also came to an abrupt end as his wife Tess (Jennifer Morrison) couldn’t stand to see her husband get pummeled.  But both are completely off the radar when it comes to ranking the best fighters in the world, so just getting into this tournament is something of a stretch.  However, the acting in this picture is superb, among the best performances of the year, where they each complement one another nicely, where Nolte is the odd man out, bruised, beaten, old and weary, who dares to hope against all fading hope that he can reconcile his differences with his two sons who refuse to acknowledge his existence, who spends his time listening to a tape in his ear of a reading of Melville’s Moby Dick.  Tommy went off to Iraq and bulked up, but so little is known about him that his life is a mystery even to himself, as he keeps everything secretly locked up inside, very much in the mold of Stallone in FIRST BLOOD (1992), where fighting is his true release, seen kicking the living crap out of a championship contender as a walk on fighter in a dingy gym, which is how he earns his reputation.  He’s also recognized by a soldier in Iraq as a war hero, but the Army has no clue who he is.  Brendan is a popular teacher, but imagine the looks on the kids faces when he walks into classes with cuts and bruises all over his face, where he’s the talk of the school forcing the administration to step in, as this is not the kind of example they’re interested in setting for young well-educated teenagers.               

While there is a working class setting of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, there is little connection to actual working class problems, as few, if any, American households can attempt to save their homes via ultimate fighting prize winnings.  Most would stand a better chance beating the odds of winning an extreme makeover offered by the Oprah Winfrey show, where they may refurbish, redecorate, and pay a year’s mortgage to save your home from foreclosure.  Instead this is all about the promised lure of dollars, where instead of hunkering down and figuring out what most families would need to do, like sell one of their two high-priced automobiles, they rely upon a Hollywood dream, a clichéd option that really doesn’t exist, only in the movies.  This movie would barely be a consideration except that the production values are excellent, the acting is extremely compelling, the suspense is palpable, using a split screen and quick cut editing technique, all adding to the build up of tension, where the ass kicking action in the ring is riveting, reinforced by the musical soundtrack by Mark Isham, all of which adds up to a remarkably well made motion picture, one that will likely delight audiences as one of the feel good pictures of the year.  The question will be whether this film has any staying power, whether any of the emotional connections have any resiliency, and whether there’s enough fan interest in the action scenes.  The blue collar setting is interesting, but the degree of dysfunctional family relationship is dark and disturbing, where the option of organized crime never intrudes, as these boys would likely have been recruited as teenagers by neighborhood gangs.  As bleak as the unfolding narrative can seem, real life often offers far darker alternatives.  There are weight divisions in every fighting match, including weigh-ins, but that seems to have been thrown by the wayside, where the fight tournament actually resembles Bruce Lee in ENTER THE DRAGON (1973), continually fending off bigger and stronger contenders, where the most patient and disciplined fighter often prevails, defying all odds, where a guy never given a chance still has a chance.  In times of financial ruin, where people are legitimately losing their jobs and their homes, not to mention their pensions and their futures, this film, like the director’s earlier 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey dream on ice, MIRACLE (2004), feels like a hope and a prayer.

Everything Must Go

EVERYTHING MUST GO         C              

USA  (96 mi)  2010  ‘Scope  d:  Dan Rush

Watching a guy laying around in his front yard in a lounge chair drinking beer, his clothes and personal belongings strewn about from a wife who kicked him out on his ass, turned into a lumberingly slow and somewhat pathetic yard sale for the next few days, is hardly one’s idea of great cinema, rather, reminiscent of some neighbor who’s become a public nuisance, airing his dirty laundry in public, which feels like leaving his dog outside subjecting everyone to his constant barking.  In most neighborhoods, there’s usually at least one guy who refuses to mow his lawn, even as the rest appear perfectly manicured and golf course textured green.   The last ornery guy in the neighborhood movie was Clint Eastwood in GRAN TORINO (2008), where a retired blue collar worker sat on his front porch drinking beer and fumed if anybody stepped on his lawn, continually uttering racist tinged expletives under his breath, eventually deciding to take matters into his own hands, becoming something of a neighborhood buttinsky, butting into other people’s business.  Here the viewer waits for other neighbors to show up to butt into this guy’s personal business, which is the subject of the movie, which suggests one guy’s sorry plight is also our own.  Like homelessness, there but before the grace of God go I, so to speak.  But rather than dissect a social phenomena of people getting thrown out on their asses in America, losing their jobs and their homes, and in some cases their families, this movie prefers to hang around on the guy’s front lawn and see what social phenomena can happen.  Again, rather than show real lives in anything resembling real life situations, the director prefers taking the Hollywood route of imagining how he can get the audience to sympathize with this one lame guy, supposedly a stand-in for all of the rest of us, thinking his personal transformation into a decent human being could be a road map for our own troubled lives.  If only it were that easy.  But the reason most are out on their asses in America is not because they are self-centered louses who drink too much, who probably deserved to get canned from their job in the first place, but decent folks who have been laid-off as it’s easier for their companies and factories to move overseas and pay a pittance than pay American workers a decent wage.  But you won’t hear any of that in this movie, which all but ignores the real social problems and instead centers on a character study of a guy whose world has been turned upside down. 

Films like this pretend to care about real life issues, but really what they’re doing is placing a star actor in an everyman’s role and then hope that it generates good revenue, hoping the actor gets good reviews and everybody working on the film gets to stay working in the business.  That’s the Hollywood dream, where in this case the idea of taking a successful television comedian and offering him a sympathetic role as just a regular guy will allow the public to see him in a different light.  In Hollywood, that’s considered going out on the edge and taking a chance.  Many will get suckered into this scheme, and that’s all it is, a scheme to raise money, like a pyramid scheme or TV evangelists begging for dollars or any other, where they attempt to fool the public into donating dollars.  Character studies continue to rely on the ROCKY (1976) formula, a rags to riches saga that usually shows the subject in an abject state of being down and out, usually desperate and all alone in the gutter, without a friend in the world where life is a waste, until eventually, oftentimes by pure accidental luck, fate offers them a second chance where they scratch their way back into human decency and hope to have the opportunity to do things differently next time around.  Now they are better prepared, and the viewer gets to see the people who help them on their path of redemption, like an extended family, seen here as Rebecca Hall, the neighbor across the street, and Christopher Jordan Wallace (excellent, by the way), son of late rap artist Biggie Smalls (The Notorious B.I.G.) and R&B singer Faith, all of which prove the adage that “It takes a village to raise a child.”  This generic formula is as old as mud, but the public is usually a sucker for it, so in Hollywood, they use it all the time, as it’s known for paying off at the box office.  Sticking comedian Will Ferrell in the lead role, allowing him to play a loveable loser, a downhearted guy who can actually provide a textured, understated performance, going against type, will likely draw sympathy for his portrayal, the big lug.  Hollywood has been putting guys like this onscreen since before the days of the Depression, where the audience can get a few laughs as they sympathize with the character’s plight.  What they forget is that the actor is getting several million dollars for his portrayal in front of the camera, hardly deserving of the public’s sympathy, more likely their outrage.      

Are famous actors, as opposed to unknowns or non-professionals, the best vehicles to deliver this kind of sentimentalized social message, one laced with so many broken American Dreams?  Apparently not, as in this wealthy neighborhood, who believes Ferrell is in need of anything?  In real life, he probably drives around in a Mercedes.  But in Hollywood we’re asked to suspend belief and believe what’s happening onscreen.  The quandary here is if it wasn’t Ferrell onscreen, no one would be watching the film, as it would be languishing on a shelf somewhere without anyone taking notice.  Ferrell brings an audience, but also artificiality, as he’s a commodity spokesperson, a walking commercial for his own career, always pandering to the audience for approval.  Unfortunately, this makes the movie about the famous actor playing a downhearted sot who needs another shot at life, leaving all the rest of the working stiffs who are out on their asses to fend for themselves, as this film hardly notices you, and uses your sorry plight for sympathy that is directed towards a millionaire actor instead of the real people who deserve it.  That’s the ass backwards approach in Hollywood, as they suck all the money out of you so you don’t have anything left to offer to those in real need.  Some people are misguided enough to think that just choosing to see a movie like this is a profound expression of their left-leaning political sympathies, as if it’s donating money for the right cause.  Well it’s not.  It goes right into the coffers of the Hollywood culture that invented this kind of generic entertainment mixed with a light social message.  It’s a breezy way of getting people to try to take a social issue seriously.  Is Will Ferrell the right spokesperson for the American economic freefall?  Probably not, as his idea of comedy probably leans more toward TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN (1969).