One of the Most Honest Movies Ever Made

Rating: 7/10 (30 December 2013)

I gotta be brutally honest, I'm not the biggest fan of sports dramas. I really ain't. I mean, I liked Rocky, Raging Bull, The Fighter, and Warrior but generally, they bore me with all the clichés they are famous for. However, The Wrestler turned out to be a refreshing film in the genre as it doesn't feature the majority of clichés found in sport dramas.
It's a brutally honest, depressing portrait of an old, broken-down wrestler named Randy(Mickey Rourke) who was once a star but now, lives a life of wrestling in local arenas for minimum wages, struggling to pay for his trailer with very few friends and loved ones. After a brutal hardcore match, Randy suffers a heart attack and survives but is told to quit wrestling, so he decides to get his life back together as he tries to reconcile with his estranged daughter, Stephanie, and get into a serious relationship with this stripper he's been befriending, Pam.
What makes this film work is as I've said before, how honest it is. The story here isn't overly sentimental or sappy, it's rather frank about its characters and who they are. Randy is one of the most realistic protagonists I've ever seen and Mickey Rourke plays him beautifully. He's a flawed but kind soul who's ruined his life because of how dedicated he is to his passion and that's actually... kinda relatable. We've all made our lives a living Hell at one point because of our passion and Randy is the embodiment of that. He's a cautionary tale of what happens when we take our passion too far and end up sacrificing our personal lives for it.
Everybody else in the cast is strong too, particularly Marisa Tomei who plays Pam with warmth and complexity. She plays her as someone who may have feelings for Randy as he respects her as a stripper rather than insulting her like her other customers but since she's a stripper, she has a difficult time slipping into a real relationship with him and Tomei conveys these emotions perfectly.
Darren Aronofsky directed this film very naturally, he made use of hand-held camera-work excessively and while it's not something I'm usually fond of, Aronofsky makes it work and it adds realism to the film rather than distracting me like it often does. He makes the actors act very naturally, never going to far to the point of melodrama but enough emotion to let us feel something. It's a very hard balance to strike in this sort of film and he managed it very well. There's not a lot of music in the film but it makes the film feel more real and less manipulative because of it, so I thought it was a pretty bold artistic choice.
The only thing that really bothers me about this film is the ambiguous ending. Now don't get me wrong, I have no problems with ambiguous endings. I loved the endings of The Shining and A Nightmare on Elm Street. However, I didn't really feel this film NEEDED an ambiguous ending as it would've been much more poetic to have Randy just die in the end. I don't know, maybe I'm just a simpleton.
Overall, Aronofsky's natural direction and the strong cast makes for a wonderfully honest film that warns us about how obsessed we could be with our passions and how we could lose our lives because of it. 8/10. Great film, highly recommended.