Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
2/12/09
When we're kids, everything
is simple, pat, black and white. Maybe that's why children of the
80's were drawn so strongly to Professional Wrestling with its' larger-than-life
cartoonish heroes and villains deciding their grudges by brute force in
the squared circle. Back in those days, wrestlers wouldn't even cop
to their characters and matches being a show, and just like Santa, we clung
to the notion that, yes, Virginia, there is an Ultimate Warrior.
But as we get older, it all turns to gray, and no matter how hard we try
to turn our heads, certain truths just insist upon being faced. Wrestling,
it turns out, is a form of scripted drama/performance art, one that an
adult can both appreciate and admire. That's not the bad part.
The bad part is the wrestling lifestyle, known as “the sickness” within
the industry, a combination of performance enhancing and illicit drugs
and constant physical punishment that has cut down dozens of my childhood
heroes and villains in their prime. It's hard to imagine a movie
capturing this contrast between the childlike purity and adult heartbreak
of Pro Wrestling better than Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler.
His documentary-style direction and Robert D. Siegel's carefully observed
screenplay set the stage, but what makes the movie remarkable is the performance
of a lifetime by resurgent Mickey Rourke, who makes a lifetime of physical
and emotional scars work for him as the most heartbreakingly realistic
performance ever as a King of the Ring.
Twenty years ago, Randy “The
Ram” Robinson (Rourke) was at the top of his profession, body-slamming
his way from one classic match to another as an adoring public cheered
his every bruise. Slowly but surely his career declined until we
find him wrestling in any high school auditorium that will have him.
Make no mistake, Randy still loves his work, every self-inflicted razor
blade slash and nail gun attack just makes him more of a legend among his
beloved co-workers, but the money doesn't even keep the rent paid for the
trailer in which he lives, so he works weekdays unloading trucks at a local
supermarket. A promoter offers him a great gig, a rematch with his
greatest foe The Ayatollah (Randall Miller), who's coming out of car-selling
retirement for the occasion, and Randy dreams this might be his Big Chance
to get back on top. But after a particularly grueling match, Randy
collapses: it's a heart attack and his doctor tells him wrestling
again would “not be a good idea.” So The Wrestler tries to retire.
He reaches out to local stripper “Cassidy” (Marisa Tomei), who suggests
that he reconnect with his estranged daughter Stephanie (Evan Rachel Wood).
Even a full-time job at the supermarket doesn't seem so bad at first, but
can “The Ram” survive without the roar of the crowd? Does he even
want to?
There's a relentless authenticity
about The Wrestler from the very first shot. Many real-life
grapplers appear in or consulted on the film, and Rourke took like a lifer
to the lessons of wrestling trainer Afa Anoai (A WWE Hall of Famer as Afa
the Wild Samoan). Aranofsky's choice of a documentary shooting style,
often hanging over characters' shoulders like a cameraman fly on the wall,
also helps, as does the critical sound-mixing decision to leave basically
every grunt and deep breath Rourke takes during the film in there.
Overall, pretty much every moment of low-rent wrestling we see rings true
with the actual high school gym experience, right down to the energy and
sense of crazy fun.
Perhaps the most fascinating
thing about The Wrestler is that 99 percent of filmmakers tackling
this topic would have made the wrestling and locker room scenes despicable,
painted the fans as bloodthirsty losers, and generally tried to see how
many times they could get critics to use the word “coliseum” in their reviews.
But Siegel, Aranosfky and Rourke go for something entirely different and
far more complex: they know that the Pro Wrestling product is lots
of fun to watch and that it's a way of life for the wrestlers themselves
in a way most of us could never imagine. And so, when the movie's
in the ring and the locker room, it's alive, funny and boisterous.
It sits back and observes Randy buying and using illegal drugs, but does
not comment, in essence looking the other way just as fans do. And
it's essential that we see the joy he takes in the wrestling lifestyle
even with all its' self-destruction, contrasted with how difficult it is
for him to do the things it takes to be a regular guy in the outside world,
in order to buy into the climax, whether we agree with it or not.
So much has already been
written about Rourke's performance, and it does live up to the hype:
to see an actor not only engage a character emotionally to this degree,
but also physically, is amazing. The scars of the actor's own self-destructive
life double so perfectly as Randy's, you can truly say this role fits him
like a glove, but that doesn't take away at all from the guts it takes
to play it. He lets us in for everything, the joy he takes in this
lifestyle to the exception of all else, the fear of trying to forge real
emotional bonds and to face an uncertain future without the only thing
he's ever loved, and the siren's call of doom that's always beckoning him
to ignore the giant surgical scar on his chest and step between those ropes
one more time.
While it would be impossible
to match him, Tomei and Wood do keep up, playing damaged souls with skillful
vulnerability. Tomei is pitch-perfect as an aging stripper:
interesting how a movie that looks so favorably upon Professional Wrestling
also casts such a cold eye upon another lifestyle that calls for selling
out one's body for the entertainment of others. Perhaps because the
world of the strip club is as dark and cynical on the outside as that of
Pro Wrestling is on the inside? Either way, she's able to make us
feel each tiny degradation “Cassidy” (not her real name, of course) suffers
as she goes through the day and the self-defeating certainty that this
is her only option that keeps her in the job. Stephanie's grim life
is glimpsed only fleetingly and we're to make our own assumptions about
it, but Wood is tremendous at depicting both the raw pain of an abandoned
child and the lure of reconciliation, no matter how much she knows in her
heart that it's all going to go wrong again.
***SPOILER ALERT***
Some will come expecting an uplifting comeback story like Rocky
(I know I did), but The Wrestler is in fact a uniquely structured
movie that features only two acts: Siegel's script presents The Ram
with a life-altering challenge, lets him try to fix it and then ends at
the moment of the crisis most movies would take as the pivot into the third
act. Of course, it's highly unlikely that there'll be any third act
after that breathtakingly perfect final shot, but I liked the fact that
the movie ends when it does and not a moment or two later, when most would.
***END OF SPOILERS*** Of course, one reason why I liked the
note the movie ends on so much is that it includes the rare end titles
song that really improves the movie it's a part of. Bruce Springsteen's
“The Wrestler” is a perfect, wistfully sad meditation on the movie's themes
in general and its' lead character in particular. And The Boss's
melancholy vocals take us out of the story in just the right way.
It's hard to imagine anyone
not being taken with Rourke's extraordinary performance, but a certain
remembered passion for Pro Wrestling is definitely a plus when it comes
to enjoying The Wrestler. It's a remarkable story about the
inability of a man, a profession, and a nation to face reality, preferring
instead to hide behind a wonderful childhood fantasy. But, man, it
was a great fantasy. |
