Rourke’s Renaissance Makes Wrestler a Winner
Some movies go out of their way to put you at ease, oozing comfort and warmth in order to get you relaxed and willing to absorb the story they’re about to tell. Others sit there rather awkwardly, lurching in fits and starts hoping you’re not going to notice their haphazard condition and enjoy yourself anyway. And then there is the group that stands up at attention and slaps you right in the face calling you to concentrate with passionate fury; demanding you keep your eyes on the screen at all times otherwise it might just off and wallop you again just for good measure.
Marisa Tomei and Mickey Rourke in Fox Searchlight's The Wrestler
Darren Aronofsky’s (The Fountain, Requiem for a Dream)
The Wrestler belongs in that latter group. The story of a once-famous professional wrestler named Randy “The Ram” Robinson (Mickey Rourke) who has since his 1980’s heyday fallen on incredibly rough times, this movie takes no prisoners, offers little solace and grips your throat like a vice daring you to try and look away. It is visceral and uncompromising, its wounded heart beating upon its sleeve like a bloody calling card impossible to miss.
But none of this is why the film is instantly one of the finest motion pictures I’ve seen all year. On one side of the equation you have the resurrection of Rourke, a fine character actor who made glorious mincemeat of small roles in films like Body Heat and leading ones in thrillers like Angel Heart and then disappeared into ego-fueled madness tearing his promising career to shreds. On the other you have a story filled with hard-hitting emotional truth and unforgiving honesty, the inner complexities of the character bracing in their pugnaciously direct exactitude.
Combined with Aronofsky’s smoothly confident direction, these two things elevate the film to a rarified stratosphere. There is a daring here, an unblinking euphoria amidst the pathos and pain that spoke directly to the center of my soul. I recognized elements of myself in all three of the main players; Randy, thirty-something single mom and stripper Cassidy (Marisa Tomei), tortured college student and daughter Stephanie (Evan Rachel Wood); each of their various choices, both good and bad, all ones I could imagine making, too.
The picture itself is filled with unforgettable signature moments. Randy and Stephanie’s boardwalk trek is particularly stunning, father and daughter bonding like neither of them had ever imagined possible. Standing in the barren wasteland of an empty warehouse, the realizations this once proud man, hardened both by life and his own poor decisions, comes to so bristling with intensity and candor they dropped me to the floor. Randy strips himself bare, offering up his naked innards to a daughter who can’t quite come to the conclusion as to whether or not she should care, the audience watching the whole encounter with hushed awe captivated by this extraordinary humanistic display.
In many ways, Rourke’s level of commitment and bravery reminded me of his performance in Barbet Schroeder’s 1987 minor classic Barfly. Yet, as good as he was in that dingy epic of two drunken losers (Faye Dunaway being the other) finding solace in their intense barstool friendship his journey here is something else entirely. He throws himself into Randy, investing him with a tragic realism that grabs you by the collar, the performance building in both weight and majesty as things progress to their unforgiving, and emotionally justified, breaking point.
The actor’s powerfully pugilistic take does raise some interesting questions, most notably a slight wonder on my part that if the actor’s own up and down career didn’t parallel the plot of the film so uncannily would I still have found this story to be so effective. In all frankness Robert D. Siegel’s screenplay follows, more or less, your basic underdog redemption template, none of the places it goes terribly surprising.
But when coupled with Rourke’s own sordid past this familiarity doesn’t matter. This is a comeback tale with cathartic punch, its saga of a highly flawed antihero trying to come to grips with the man he was and the person he thinks he wants to be soaking in the grit and grime of a life lived on the razor’s edge. It all builds to an uncertain coda that’s equal parts uplift and disgust, depressive ennui running through the bloody veins of a redemption maybe not entirely justified (or worth the ultimate price to obtain).
Aronofsky is quickly proving himself to be a master of character-driven drama. Whether they be problems of the mind, consequences of love, drug-induced demons or regrets born of the narcissistic craving for applause and adulation the director isn’t afraid to dive into the muck in order to find the majesty. He wants the warts, the wounds, the scrapes, the cuts and the bruises, he wants to see the pain and, in doing so, has become a masterful craftsman analyzing the multifarious complexities of the human heart second to none. The Wrestler is no exception, fewer 2008 films leaving an impression as deep, poignant or as long-lasting.
