Member-only story
One of my all-time favourite films, if not my ABSOLUTE all-time favourite film, is Warrior. The movie featured Joel Edgerton and Tom Hardy as estranged brothers meeting in an impossible MMA fight. That ending has moved me to tears more times than I am able to count. (I actually confessed this to Edgerton’s father when we ended up seated together at an NSW Legal Society compulsory annual legal training shindig — which was SUCH a treat. Probably the highlight of my legal career - which says a bit about the way I feel about my career… but I digress.)
A wonderful Nick Nolte plays the brother’s father as a tortured Vietnam vet, who is a historic drunk but now AA devotee, with a history of being domestically violent and abusive. There are strong parallels with the Tommy character’s Iraq vet trauma.
I just love this film without reservation. I worry that writing about it may pull out its magic, in a similar way to the way that a syringe works…
Anyway, there are a few things that I will dare say. No stories written by your dad that are designed to be revealing could ever be completed without discussing the way art, movies, music or TV series impact me so viscerally. It is also about what my favourite pieces of these forms of art do for me outside of the act of absorbing them. For example, I will often watch this film to motivate myself to take some action I have put off. In this example, I get motivated to exercise. Not just because the actors are so shredded that Hardy’s character Tommy, looks like an example of the way steroids and other bodybuilding drugs can be SUPER RESPONSIVE for certain genotypes.
Putting this aside, their envious physical forms are in keeping with their violent skill sets. But that is not why I watch the movie. So I exercise, or out of body envy. Actors get routinely shredded for comic movies, and I glaze over.
No, this one hits me in many ways that other movies do not and cannot. It's that mystery effect that makes me reach for the runners and contemplate trying to set up a boxing bag in my apartment, despite not having fought another shit-scared fighter in a ring in more than 20 years…
There are just so many great scenes. This movie is a string of great scenes, like a Philly working-class Godfather. I will break down the final scene to illustrate and look; this is an old movie. By the time you are old enough to enjoy it, this will have aged because you won’t be able to walk around in the movie…
