The Fighter

When I turned into the Showcase Cinema parking lot at 10:30 yesterday morning the cars were already streaming in for the first  showing on the very first day of  The Fighter's limited opening. On the way I passed through the city center and the neighborhoods, past peeled paint and fresh paint, mills and row-houses, the churches the shops housed in what I know to be inns and taverns still standing since the 1850s.'Still Standing' would also have been a good name for this film about two brothers born in my hometown, the older one when I was in 5th grade at the Moody School, the younger when I was trudging home from the bus stop, an armful of books hugged tight to my chest. Both began boxing in the years I was coming home from college to find out, in that thrilling underage way, just what a boilermaker was and who you had to walk in with to get served one.This is a story about blood, both the kind you share with your family and the kind you leave on the floor as life hits you the way it hits us all sooner or later, "head-body-head-body” as Micky explains his chief tactic to his girl Charlene.  And the violence of the sport seems so much worse the way this film reveals it, principally on the faces of the ones who love Micky as they witness the carnage, just inches from the ropes.Somehow you end up rooting for them all, not just for the two boxers and Charlene and the Greek chorus of mouthy sisters, not just for the by-turns tough-and-tearful mom and the heart-of-gold dad but even for the asphalt. Even for the poor forlorn and childlike crack addicts.Almost 900 students graduated my year from Lowell High School and sure many have left; but many have stayed too and still work and/or live there. They are loyal in the same way any Bruce Springsteen fan would understand. In a way that those of us who left understand too, all of us children of a place that sits at the confluence of two great rivers, its  ropey waters braiding and twisting like the sinews on a young athlete’s back.