Get the matchmaking right and a fight can be special. The artifice rarely changes, the cage will have 8 sides, the round will be 3 (or 5) minutes, there will be just a ref and two guys -- so you need the right two guys. And right doesn't always mean the best or most talented. Think flops like Roy / Toney or St. Pierre / anyone. Often, right means contrast, means styles. Getting one guy who loves the uppercut on the inside, the other who will eat a couple just to land a counter left hook. One guy who fights fast, another who fights smart. There's a lot in Warrior that's not new to fight movies, a lot of that jingoism that we've seen in movies like Red Belt and Lionheart. But, here the matchmaking (or ‘casting’ if you prefer) is pretty right.
Warrior got shelved to avoid competing with Bale, Wahlberg and The Fighter. Good choice as the two movies have some strong parallels. The professional-fighting echoes the inter-familial sparring, the white lower middle-class characters echo the white lower middle-class characters. Warrior opens with a skyline of rust-colored smoke stacks. Nick Nolte, face blue-collar worn, wrinkles on wrinkles, driving home from church, rosary swinging from the rearview and Moby Dick on audio playing off the tape deck. Paddy Conlon has years of fight experience, both the professional kind and the domestic kind. We get the sense that pro-wise he wasn’t great. We do know that when it came to his wife, he had a good connect percentage on jabs. So one-sided were the punch stats, that his youngest son and amateur wrestling phenom, Tommy (Tom Hardy), had long-ago whisked his mother away to the west coast. The older son, Brendan (Joel Edgerton), stayed back with pops so he (Brendan) could stay and marry his high school sweetheart.
Cut to a decade and some change later and Paddy is 1000 days sober. Tommy is back in town after nursing his mom through death. So he’s, understandably, a little bit angry-ish. Brendan is the most popular teacher at the local high school. He lectures about acceleration on a body-at-rest using a baseball bat and a block of wood. Less obviously angry than Tommy, but he’s got some of his own issues as the bank is looking to foreclose on the house he can’t afford. Conveniently, both guys took after their dad. They are fighters. So when Sparta, a national MMA middleweight tournament, goes down, they both enter, Tommy mostly to get rid of some angst, Brendan to win that 5-mil and save his house.
Styles make fights, but so does anger. Frazier wanted to kill Ali in Manilla, Duran, Ray in Montreal. And when it comes to family, that`s a special kind of anger where kill is too simple an out. Resentment drives Warrior and the main players resent in such contrasting, yet vivid, styles. Tom Hardy is like Bale: they’re chameleons of physique. Hardy’s jacked in Warrior, but a different kind of jacked than he was in Bronson. In the latter, he was all barrel-chest from sit-ups and push-ups, exercises limited by the confines of solitary. In the former, he’s steep-trapezoids and he walks in a hunch, as if weighed-down. He did, after all, watch his mom cough up blood and die. So there’s no subtlety when it comes to the beef he has with his pops. “I liked you better as a drunk,” Tommy says, disappointed that punching him in the mug isn’t going to be as satisfying as he’d imagined. And Tommy doesn`t hide his beef with Brendan, who didn’t go-along, who chose some girl instead of their mother. Tommy paces in the cage prior to the bell, sits-down on every left-hook, too jacked-up with rage to conserve energy for the championship rounds.
On the other hand, Brendan does a lot of rope-a-dope, takes 5 shots to give one. He’s the gentler of the two brothers, a teacher and a father. We first see him wearing a makeshift shawl and letting his daughters paint his face. It’s his eldest’s birthday party. His wife admonishes him, lovingly, for buying an extravagant gift. There’s something sad to his gentleness, in the way that he needs reassurance from his coach (a Greg Jackson homage who chooses Beethoven for Brendan’s entrance music) during the ring-walk. While Tommy paces between rounds, Brendan sits on his stool to recover. His is a different type of resentment, one tinged with guilt. He missed out on the privilege to help his mother, to suffer with her properly. Fighting, for him, is partly self-flagellation. While Tommy gets off from smashing the other guy (“He’s leaving the cage like it`s a crime scene,” the play-by-play guy says), Brendan gets off by getting smashed just a little bit more than he needs.
The two brothers share about two scenes in the movie’s 120 minutes. Warrior is divided almost equally between their two paths to the 16-man tournament (don’t miss Kurt Angle as the Russian superstar Koba). You`d think that your sympathy would fall to the gutsier dude, the nice guy with the family. “You always liked the frontrunner,” Brendan tells his father, some extra resentment regarding his place in the son-hierarchy, “never the underdog.” But equal sypathy goes to the other guy who flips a casino-bucket of quarters in his begging dad’s face, to the guy who scoffs at the photo of his toddler nieces. “I don`t know them”, Tommy tells Brendan as he (Brendan) offers forth the wallet-sized portrait. We cheer both for Tommy to heal his scars and for Brendan to not lose his house. Both very vivid, yet very different portraits. Styles make fights and styles make fight-movies, too.
