Gavin O’Connor’s 2011 film, Warrior, begins quietly in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Shots of a grey and chilly working-class town establish the locale. An old man steps down the steps of a church. The gentle, but ominous tones of The National’s “Start a War” play over the opening. “Walk away now, and you’re gonna start a war,” Matt Beringer sings wearily. From the first moments of Warrior, there is a sense that much more is in store than one might think from a film marketed as a combat sports movie.
Warrior is not a mixed martial arts movie. Despite what the poster and synopsis suggest, MMA is merely the vehicle for a story about three broken men trying to find and fulfill their purpose. The patriarch’s purpose is to live the remainder of his life as the man he should have been, but with the return of his estranged son, Tommy, come the ghosts that haunt him. The tension in their reunion is immediately palpable. A rugged Tommy (Tom Hardy) sits on his old man’s stoop, sipping from a whiskey bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag. The old man, Paddy Conlon (Nick Nolte), smiles widely and yet uneasily as he approaches Tommy. The weight of the past is heavy between them before the past is even discussed.
As the two men enter Paddy’s home, Tommy wanders about the living room, taking in the memories on the table tops and shelves. He asks Paddy if he’s seeing anyone these days. Paddy replies that there is no room for women in his life after Tommy’s mother died. “Must be hard to find a woman who can take a punch,” Tommy replies. Theirs will not be a happy reunion. The circumstances of Tommy and his mother’s departure are revealed in bites and chunks throughout the film. Paddy is a recovering alcoholic, but his days of sobriety have arrived after his drunkenness has cost him his entire family.
Tommy has demons of his own. A wrestling prodigy whom his father lived through, he then ran away from home, taking his dying mother with him. After her death, Tommy joined the Marines and was sent to Iraq, where new horrors were waiting for him. He comes home full of rage, popping pills and drinking from thar brown bag to manage his way through his days.
Tommy has an older brother named Brendan (played by Joel Edgerton), who is comparatively well-adjusted. He’s a high school physics teacher in a stable marriage with two kids, and while Brendan may live in the same state as his father, just under six hours away in Philadelphia, they may as well be on separate planets.
The three men haven’t seen each other in years, but events in their lives put them on a collision course in the form of a winner-takes-all steel cage tournament. Tommy’s reasons for entering the contest are mysterious at first, but it’s not hard to figure out that he’s not doing it for himself. In fact, it’s probably been a long time since Tommy has done anything for himself. That Tommy would turn to his father to train him, however contentiously, tells you how important the event is to him.
Brendan’s need for the prize is made plain early on. He’s upside-down on his mortgage and has a young daughter with a heart condition. He and his wife are holding down three jobs between them, but it’s not enough to make ends meet. Brendan was once a fighter, too. He was not the prodigy that Tommy was, and therefore has his own resentments towards his father that go beyond the booze and the violence–he was the big brother overshadowed by the more accomplished Tommy, in and out of the home.
Their shared mutual derision for their father does not bring Tommy and Brendan closer. There was a time before Tommy left with his mother that the two men had a pact. Brendan broke that pact. In an emotionally punishing scene on the Atlantic City beach, Tommy rejects Brendan and the photo of his nieces that his older brother shows him. “I don’t know them,” Tommy says as he looks at the picture. Doubling down, Tommy tells Brendan that the only brothers he has are in the Corps. Brendan may be a gifted physics teacher, but no science can help him reach his brother.
In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare wrote, “All have been banished.” Paddy, Tommy, and Brendan have all been banished from one another. Even as Tommy reluctantly allows Paddy to train him for the tournament, they are still operating like remote islands. Paddy makes an effort to close the gap between them, but Tommy continually rebuffs him. Training is all Paddy is good for. Yet Paddy can’t help but try to connect. His final effort occurs in front of a slot machine that Tommy is half-heartedly pulling the handle on. As Paddy mounts a soft offensive meant to pull at Tommy’s heart, Tommy rejects Paddy publicly and viciously. He breaks the old man.
Much of Hardy’s performance is internal. He wears his bruises on the inside. His body is like a coat of armor, but in his eyes, you can still see a hurt and scared little boy. As Paddy departs the slots, Tommy tosses his coins at the machine and mutters an expletive. The son, the little boy, is still inside, but is he too far buried with pain, anger, and self-hatred?
Edgerton counters by giving a subtle performance where he wears his heart on his sleeve, quietly. He’s a good husband, a loving father, and the kind of teacher that every high school kid wishes they could have. He’s knowledgeable, engaged, and funny without trying too hard or going on tangents that slow the pace of learning. He’s one of those men who saw horrible things as a child, took his share of beatings, and somehow turned out to be the opposite of the environment he grew up in.
Brendan’s rejection of Paddy’s efforts to reconnect is firm, and angry, but not unfair. Brendan has come to the reasonable conclusion that the father who favored his brother over him, who ruled his house with a heavy hand, is not someone he should have in his life. His words towards his father are hard, but they are rational.
Tommy and Brendan’s commonalities are as strong as their differences, but the differences hold court, and soon they will play out in the cage.
Paddy is seen early on listening to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. He listens to Melville’s novel while driving, at home, and in his hotel room. Paddy’s interest in Ahab and the whale goes far beyond the enjoyment of classic literature. There is something he seeks from this book. An answer, perhaps. Or, quite possibly, the ability to change Ahab’s narrative, to go back, to save himself and his crew. Never is this belief more evident than when Paddy falls off the wagon, and in a scene so raw that it is hard to watch, screams at Ahab to “Stop the ship, you godless sonuvabitch! Stop the ship!” The near self-immolation that Nolte puts himself through is vanity-free, frightening, and quite possibly the finest moment of his acting career. Nolte reveals who Paddy is. He is Ahab.
O’Connor stages Warrior with fistic verve in the ring, and with a rugged elegance outside of it. The human drama of the film is intertwined with the battles that go on inside the cage. The camera never steadies for long throughout the film. Cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi’s lensing makes the action sequences feel alive and appropriately chaotic. The always-in-motion camera can disorient your view just as a real fight would. Depending on where the action is taking place in the ring, you may not see every blow, turn, or move. O’Connor takes you in the ring to give you the fighter’s eye view and then outside of the ring as if you were a spectator in the seats. It’s about as close to a “you are there” experience as one can get from watching a film. By employing the same, if toned-down, method in the interpersonal scenes, O’Connor and Takayanagi create a consistent sense of restlessness. The fights aren’t only happening in the cage; they are happening in the hearts of the characters. They spar with each other, and notably, with themselves. HBO boxing commentator Jim Lampley used to say, “Life is a fight.” O’Connor’s film is a most brilliant exemplar of Lampley’s statement.
Warrior’s screenwriters (O’Connor, Anthony Tambakis, and Cliff Dorfman) surround the three main subjects of the film with characters who add to the authenticity of the picture at every turn.
As Brendan’s wife, Tess, Jennifer Morrison (best known for House and Once Upon a Time) takes what could have been a basic “supportive spouse” role and delivers a performance with agency, complexity, and a range of mixed emotions. Tess doesn’t want her husband to fight. But she doesn’t have a better plan for keeping up with their mortgage either. Her journey in the film could have been clichéd or even tedious. Morrison imbues Tess with genuine conflict.
Frank Grillo plays Brendan’s old friend and reluctant trainer, Frank Campana, whose scarred face, muscled physique, and straight-talking manner make him a perfect fit as a man on his way to becoming a grizzled lifer in the fight game. More than that, though, Warrior provides the trainer with eccentricity, as he works his charge to the sounds of Beethoven during practice, and sends Brendan into the ring with “Ode to Joy” playing over his walk into the cage. Campana believes that understanding Beethoven will help his fighters remain calm during the most fraught moments of combat. He is a man with a code—a true believer. A trainer who sees in a deaf, bewigged, German composer who died nearly two hundred years ago the key to Brendan believing in himself.
Kevin Dunn as Brendan’s high school principal delivers a deft, low-key hysterical, and even joyful performance as an administrator who hectors Brendan’s decision to fight after the physics teacher shows up to class with bruises and welts on his face, but can’t help but cheer on his suspended faculty member.
Many of the fighters in the film are MMA combatants in real life. It is to Hardy and Edgerton’s great credit that they do not look out of place against seasoned professionals when trading blows with them. Hardy, in particular, resembles a Greek statue that has fallen off a podium. It’s as if his shoulder muscles have muscles. He is a human wrecking ball, a mini-Hulk. Even the ringside announcers, constantly looking to be loudly quotable, are so on point as to be obnoxiously accurate.
It’s no spoiler to say that the two brothers will face off in the ring. Brendan holds back at first, but Tommy’s seething anger and self-loathing manifest into immediate brutality in the ring. The outcome in terms of who wins and who loses may or may not be surprising, but it’s the “how” that matters. As one brother is injured but refuses to quit, the other is given the dominant advantage. He begs his hurt brother to quit, and when that doesn’t happen, he takes him to the ground and puts his injured brother into a chokehold. Not only does he continue to beg him to give, but he also tells his battered brother that he loves him and that he’s sorry. For as much as the brother with the upper hand may want to win the tournament and the prize that goes with it, in that moment, it’s as if he’s trying to choke whatever love his sibling has left inside of him to come out. He is fighting for much more than a cash prize.
As the film builds to its climax, a seamless sound edit from Mark Isham’s score to another song by The National, “About Today,” occurs. It’s a magnificent technical achievement that greatly and almost invisibly enhances the drama. “About Today” is a slow-building song that culminates in a swirling crescendo of sound, propelling the sequence to dizzying heights. The matching of the needle drop to the action in the fight creates a romantic brutality in the scene. You can feel your chest swelling as the music illuminates the stakes at hand.
When the fight mercifully comes to an end, it gives rise to a new beginning. Two men who were lost find each other through the most surprising of means. Fists, legs, knees, bodies coming together to cause pain, release all the bitterness and regret. To call it stirring is nothing more than me admitting that I don’t have a better word. Maybe one doesn’t exist.
When the fight is over, the brothers walk away from the ring, leaning on each other, needing each other, ignoring the cacophony of raised voices around them in the arena. They become one. They end the war.
Warrior is not an MMA movie.
