Joyce Carol Oates
The Fighter’s Cruel Art
*The Fighter* might more accurately have been titled *The Fighter and His Family*: it’s a boisterous, brilliantly orchestrated ensemble piece at the paradoxically near-still center of which is an Irish-American boxer (Mark Wahlberg), whose once-promising career, like his grim hometown, Lowell, Massachusetts, is on what appears to be an inevitable downward spiral.
February 3, 2011