Review: The Wrestler (4/5)

The Wrestler
(Darren Aronofsky)
Mickey Rourke, Marisa Tomei, Ernest Miller, Evan Rachel Wood.
Running time: 115 minutes. (16)

The Wrestler stars Mickey Rourke as Randy the Ram, a wrestler pinned on the canvas of life. Twenty years ago, he was a superstar professional. Now his career has been power-slammed. He wrestles at town-hall championships for spare cash and lives alone in a trailer park where he can’t make the rent. His heart has taken a beating. He has an out-of-contact daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) whom he has neglected and his only hope of love is with a stripper called Cassidy (Marisa Tomei) who won’t get involved with a customer. No wonder his ticker gives out with a heart attack. His spirit has taken a pile-driver. You expect him to tap out at any moment. The commentator in your head screams ‘this is over!’. But wait. Randy the Ram is flexing his muscles! Randy is getting up! Can he ever again jump from the top rope?

The Wrestler is a moving and beautifully restrained story, in the words of Bruce Springsteen’s touching end-credit song, about a one-trick pony. Randy is set to play a 20th anniversary grudge match when his heart attack sends him into retirement. What’s he to do? This is the kind of guy who, when shopping with another wrestler, breaks frying pans over the guy’s head. He’s a wrestler through and through.
He’s never more at home than backstage before a game. We see him in a dressing room full of muscle and make-up, and the place looks like a hang-out for failed superheroes. Before each game, the wrestlers discuss a gameplan and the film is quick to dismiss wrestling as a sport. It even reminds you of how much fun it is to watch: when Randy throws his opponent into the crowd, a spectator hands him a trashcan to bash the guy with. Which makes you wonder: who in the hell brings a trashcan to a wrestling event? Then another man offers Randy his prosthetic leg which is used to give him a kicking.

Wrestling is showmanship, but the blows are real. Randy now wears a hearing aid. One gap-toothed wrestler riddles Randy’s back with a staple gun. His side is speared with barbed wire. Tomei’s Cassidy, herself struggling with a heavy load, tells Randy he looks like Christ. She’s referring to his flowing blonde highlights. (Though you can bet Christ didn't shave his armpits).

And you wonder whose sins does Randy do this for? He’s the kind of guy who can barely express his emotions. He wants to take his inner pain and make it physical in the ring.

What gives The Wrestler a bonus layer of poignancy is Mickey Rourke’s Lazarus return as a leading man. The 1980s star of Nine1/2 Weeks had the smooth, square-set features of a Corvette. Now his face is written off, as if he wrapped himself around a lamp-post. His shapeless, pudge-face is now embedded with gravel. He speaks as if he lost an exhaust pipe. For large parts of The Wrestler, the camera follows him from behind, as if it were too ashamed to look at him.

You don’t expect this from director Darren Aronofsky. His debut Pi filmed the paranoid Maximillian Cohen head-on, locked into stride, so you could do nothing but stare turmoil in the face. Aronofsky was brazen and blunt and in a hurry to announce himself. In Requiem for a Dream, he wanted to bludgeon you into his waking nightmare. Now he has found grace in maturity. When he photographs Randy in long shot, in forlorn empty spaces chilled by winter, or in the noir-inflected gloom of his trailer park – all slatted lighting and puddles of darkness – he wants not to evoke his own talent, but the loneliness and heavy heart of his character.

And what an unforgettable character. Rourke becomes the larger-than-life wrestler, but he fills up Randy’s hollowed personality with a broken dignity. There’s a beautiful shot where he walks with his back to us through a warren of corridors. It feels like he’s backstage: you can hear the crowd roar in anticipation. But it’s in his head. He’s psyching himself up for his first shift at a deli meat counter. “Do I know you from somewhere?” asks one man getting an order.

In Limelight, at the end of his career, Charlie Chaplin made a film about a neglected vaudeville star who nobody wanted to watch any more. It’s hard not to see The Wrestler too as the story of Mickey Rourke. But unlike Limelight, there’s little self-pity. Randy carries a tattoo saying ‘Job’ on his knuckle: he stoically takes the knockdowns and only blames himself. “I’m an old, broken-down piece of meat. And I’m alone. And I deserve to be alone,” he tells Cassidy at one point. But yet, he’s never pathetic.

Aronofsky’s film is a lament for men like Randy, the John Tuckers of the world, troubled men who can only do what they do. But it’s a tribute, too, to an icon who has got himself back into the ring. To watch The Wrestler is to watch Mickey Rourke back on that top rope. Here’s hoping he bodyslams that Oscar.