Indicative of Mickey Rourke's Career

Rating: 10/10 (29 January 2009)

The Wrestler is a very good drama filled with originality. The film follows a fictional character named Randy "Ram" Robinson whose a "has been" wrestler. His prime far behind him and continues to wrestle hoping to get back in the lime light.
The acting Mickey Rourke was quite good deserving his Oscar nomination. His feelings of loneliness and isolation is very heart felt and sad to watch. His search for some sort of love becomes far more important to him as wrestling now endangers his life. He attempts to reconcile with his daughter played by Evan Rachel Wood and takes a love interest in a stripper played very well by Marisa Tomei. Altogether it culminates into a very sad, open but yet satisfying ending. The authenticity of all the emotions could not be better displayed by any other actor than Mickey Rourke who like his character shares many experiences and hardships in order to get back to fame. It brings out an amazing amount of depth out of his character and simply pushes the film to that of the least a very good movie.
The direction of Darren Aronofsky and writing of Robert Siegel combined for an amazingly heart felt sympathy portrayal of a man. The movie is left open yet simultaneously feels as if its all we need to know. That we've gotten what we need to see and can figure out things for ourselves. The abrasive and gritty look of the movie only adds to the emotions felt for the character. Usually I would not mention this at all but Bruce Springsteen's song was a superb song for the movie as he always captures the scope of a movie and its complicity.
Hopefully this film will set up Mickey Rourke for more films to make as he has certainly convinced me here that hes worthy of more lead roles. His comeback story is compelling in that he was literally a forgotten soul up until this was made. He reputation had dispersed so much that it took years of searching for distributors from Darren Aronofsky that would accept Mickey Rourke as the lead actor. Well it certainly payed off and it shouldn't of been made any other way.