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‘Warrior’ is a masterpiece of populist entertainment. The term ‘populist’ might be considered, by some, to be a lesser artform, but really it’s not.  It’s an artform that’s a balancing act, that carries certain preconceptions from the audience coming in and one that isn’t afraid to swing for the fences with emotion and ground-swelling action.  That’s where “Warrior” comes from.

The backbone of the story is sports genre boilerplate, where down on their luck figures convince friends/family of their worth, then train and fight for a specific title or purse.  That’s the kind of baggage that populist entertainment comes with.  It’s almost like taking stock B-movie plots and then juicing them up with as much character, past hurt, psychological damage and real life colour and interest so as to make the audience forget that they’ve been here many times before.  It may take longer for some, but I believe that by the end of this film all audience members will have gotten there.

Australian actor Joel Edgerton stars as Brendan Conlon, a public school physics teacher; married with three kids, and facing financial hardship. English actor Tom Hardy plays Tommy Riordan, Brendan’s estranged brother, an ex-marine and harbouring a lot of resentment and secrets from his recent past. Both are unknowingly pursuing the same goal of winning an MMA victory in Atlantic City, for a huge payday, and for drastically different reasons.

The real interest in the story comes from the family drama.  Nick Nolte plays Brendan and Tommy’s father, a recovering alcoholic, at peace with his past wrongs until Tommy shows up on his doorstep.  The intensity and depth of relationship between these three is the heart of the movie.  Writer-director Gavin O’Connor does a superb job of allowing the first half of the film to breath with only these three characters, nothing else matters.  He pretty much leaves the soundtrack bare of score for all this time as well.  For that first half the film reminded me of the great films to come out of the 70s, like the ‘China Syndrome’ or ‘All the President’s Men’, not for any similarities between the stories but because of this breathtakingly simply style of character driven story without false emotion on the soundtrack.  O’Connor knows that the more we’re invested in these relationships, the more we care about the more conventional sports outcome.  It’s much the same way as the original ‘Karate Kid’ or ‘Rocky’ performed; the final tournament or fight mattered because of the build up to it.

The three lead performances are uniformally superb. Edgerton has been acting for a long while now (his CV lists 53 titles) but he is only now being recognized in North America.  He has a relaxed, unmannered style, that draws you in and makes you forget that he’s a pretty solid and imposing figure. Hardy has already made an impression over here, with his work in ‘Bronson’ and ‘Inception’, but here his performance is mostly in his faraway gaze, leaving us constantly wondering where he’s coming from, what his intentions are and where his loyalties lie.  It’s a fascinating dynamic between the two, because you’re never quite sure who to root for or against, who the de facto ‘bad guy’ is.  The trick, I believe, is that there isn’t one.  There isn’t even one in the brothers broken relationship with their father.  What the film does so well is allow scene upon scene to build so that there is never just one confrontation that resolves something.  It’s how things change over time.  Even by the end of the film things haven’t been mended, but it’s a start.  It’s so great to see Nick Nolte back the way I remember him, doing solid character work far away from the mangy, craziness that he’s been mired in these past years.  He has two volatile scenes, one with each brother, and his focus and attention to the slightest nuances of his vocal pitch are absolute perfection.  It’s heartbreaking to see him try so hard to start over again with his sons, but you also know that things can’t be put back together that easily.  There can’t be a blank slate, per say, but maybe by the end of the film a third option might present itself.  This film presents optimism as a realistic possibility, not as a Hollywood trope.  It’s a refreshing change from the cynicism we regularly see.

The second half of the film is where the action takes hold.  Now that O’Connor has set us up, we’re wired to follow the action where it may lead.  He could very easily have set the movie on autopilot here, but he’s smarter than that. As he demonstrated with his exceptional ‘Miracle’, from 2004, he knows how to orchestrate a visual action scene so that geographically we understand all that we see, and he also paces those sequences so that we never get ahead of him.  Each fight battles unpredictability at every turn.  Some fights are instantaneous, others drag on, painfully so.  He orchestrates it so that the longer you have to stay in that cage, the more dangerous the prospect of winning becomes.  The choreography of the fights, and the immediacy of the Masanobu Takayanagi’s photography, keep the action grounded in reality, and then Mark Isham’s meditative, but percussive, score lulls the viewer into a state of heightened emotion.  It’s extremely difficult to not hold tight to something or to spontaneously applaud at several key moments.

That leads us to the climax of the film, which I won’t discuss here in detail. Let it just be said that I was wonderfully surprised, and touched by how the film so successfully married the family drama to the fighting storyline.  It wasn’t patchwork, they benefited each other.  There is genuine sadness, elation and melancholy by the end of this film.  It’s a wonderfully sad ending, mostly because of the possibilities that it presents for its characters futures.  I don’t make any excuses for loving films like this, as I do.  I think it’s a shame when one can’t lose themselves in a simply well told story, in spite of its possible genre traps.

‘Warrior’ wears its heart on its sleeve, but with much more resonance and depth than was expected.

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