The Fighter

Film title: The Fighter
Tagline(s): Every dream deserves a fighting chance
Director: David O. Russell
Screenplay: Paul Tamasy, Scott Silver, Eric Johnson
Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, Melissa Leo, Amy Adams
Cinema Release Date: 10 December 2010 (USA) 2 February 2011 (UK)
DVD Distributor: Vision Video (UK); Universal Studios (USA)
DVD Release date: 02 December 2002 (UK); 14 January 2003 (USA)
Certificate: 15 (UK); R (USA) Contains strong language and hard drug use


Warning: This article contains plot spoilers

The Fighter is as much a movie about a family’s fight for reconciliation, as it is about a boxer and his comeback to the world of welterweight championship. Based on a true story, the film is set in Lowell, a town languishing in industrial decline. Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) is a light welterweight boxer, who has had a run of defeats against badly matched opponents. These fights were arranged by Dicky (Christian Bale), his trainer and older brother, and by his mother, Alice (Melissa Leo), a know-it-all nagger, who runs her family of nine children and a timid husband with a tight reign.

All his life, Micky has lived in the shadow of his loud-mouthed, attention-seeking, elder brother. Surprisingly, for a boxer, Micky is a quiet, shy guy. Aware of his mother’s favouritism towards Dicky, he deals with being sidelined by retreating into a desperate silence. Family loyalty leads him to be clannish to the point where he cannot voice his frustration about his domineering mother, clingy sisters and overbearing brother without feeling guilty. He falls in love with Charlene (Amy Adams), a tough-talking waitress who encourages him to maintain a healthy distance from his family and set clear boundaries in his relationship with them.

Things begin to change when Dicky is sent to prison. Micky finds a new trainer and, with support from his father and Charlene, breaks away from his mother’s management and hires a new manager. Soon enough, he begins winning every match he fights.

One of the central themes is Micky’s struggle to separate himself from his family and to make an identity for himself. If we are to utilise our abilities and follow our dreams, it is often necessary that we first sort out the issues from our past that have the potential for affecting our future adversely. As the old proverb goes, we don’t get to choose the family we’re born in, and it can be very difficult to distance oneself from the influence of a destructive family. Micky found it incredibly hard admitting that the people who were supposed to be his family had let him down. He felt that his identity, and his talent as a boxer, was tied up with his relationship with his family. He needed the support of someone who believed in him because of who he was, not because of who he was related to. Charlene gave him the courage he required to define boundaries with his family. However, she would have preferred him to have nothing more to do with them from then on. She helped him on his way to finding out who he was when he wasn’t being influenced by his family. Clearly, the message being spelt out here is that, to become who you were meant to be, you need to get rid of the baggage that families can sometimes become.

However, in a deciding match before the title bout, Micky’s boxing plan fails miserably, and he takes a beating round after round until he resorts to the tactics his brother taught him, which leads to a win. He realizes that he needs to continue training with his brother, if he is going to use his potential to the utmost. Charlene, however, feels that Micky is risking his success on the chance that Dicky will prove to be reliable, and she decides to leave rather than watch him fail. Knowing that Micky needs the stability and support that she can offer, Dicky goes after Charlene and convinces her to return. And so the brothers begin training together again, and the Ward family attempts to be less criticising and more attentive to Micky’s opinion.

Families are important; other than the obvious fact that we need parents to bring us into being and then to nurture us, we are also relational beings by nature and our development into mature adults depends on the relationships we have growing up. The Bible very clearly explains that God intended that we live as part of families, and that we have a mutual responsibility within the framework of a family to make it work.



At first Micky resorts to the extreme of cutting himself off from his family as he tries to figure out who he is as an individual. We empathise with his need for a separate identity, as it is a need experienced by us all at some point. According to the Bible, our identity, in itself and in relation to others, needs to be found in our relationship with God. As human beings, we are created in the image of God. If that is true, perhaps we would find out more about ourselves if we can find out more about him. And while we can try various sources of information to find out more about God, the best way to get to know him would be by developing a relationship with him. However, the Bible also says that we all have rebelled and fallen short of God’s standards, and our imperfection acts as a barrier between us and God’s perfect nature. But despite our imperfections, God loves us and wants to give us a new identity in his family. The only solution to that problem was Jesus dying on the cross, to endure the punishment we deserved. In doing so, he made a way for us to come back to God. Accepting God’s offer of forgiveness for our rebellion allows us to become what God wants us to be. And since God is our maker, who would better know what we are supposed to be like, and what our identity should consist of? This realisation releases us from the need to live up to the unhealthy expectations that society tends to place on us and instead frees us to live, with God’s help, according to his expectation.

And perhaps that is a better way of getting rid of the baggage from our past, rather than, like Micky, getting rid of our families’ altogether. The Fighter demonstrates this note of reconciliation when the brothers get back together to train for the title match. Micky wins not only because he sets boundaries with his family, but also because he is able to rely on their support when he needs to. In the final scene, his family, his trainers, his girlfriend and his manager join him in the ring to celebrate his victory, which he would not have achieved without them all.