hopelessness as redemption

Rating: 9/10 (25 January 2009)

Just for a change, let's talk about Evan Rachel Wood. As the daughter of this movie's absolute focal point, the anabolic phoenix you-know-who, she gives a hyperventilating, overwrought, method-ish performance, especially in the last of her three scenes, when she slams the door on the long-lost stumblebum's last chance at redemption. The effect is jarring, wrong: she seems to be coming in from another world, or at least another movie. And then, days later, you realize that you have been caught, sucked into seeing Wood from the wrestler's point of view: he can't possibly understand her either. The years apart have rendered the divide unbridgeable, little miss Emo versus a guy who has learned to accept every sort of punishment as a way of life. She is truly gone, and this is why he rejects Marisa Tomei's attempt at a happy ending: refusing to chase the shadows of domestic bliss is his own brand of wisdom. This kind of working-class fatalism is a sentimental fallacy, running through ring movies from the dawn of time; but it is so perfectly played and so dramatically inevitable that you understand its truth even as you struggle against it. None of which would mean much without the anabolic phoenix, whom I've never seen in a lead role before and whose shattered stoicism would have been just as devastating if this were his first film.