Rourke's redemption? Aronofsky coming down to earth? Yes to both, and mostly for the best.

Rating: 8/10 (27 January 2009)

Randy the Ram's glory days were in the mid-80s, as the cheesy graphics in the opening credits remind us, the camera panning over old pictures and tear-sheets advertising his matches. Randy's a professional wrestler, an entertainer whose body is his business, as we're reminded over and over, sometimes subtly but most of the time fairly bluntly in this very heartfelt film about his life and potential redemption. And by extension, that of the former big star who plays Randy, Mickey Rourke.
This is Rourke's film through and through and in a year with a great many very fine male lead performances - Sean Penn in "Milk" and Clint Eastwood in "Gran Torino" both managed all-time-great work - this might be the best. Rourke inhabits this role like a second skin, a bruised and bloodied steroid-enhanced skin with a mind under it that is active enough but still delusional, still the video-game-playing headbanging kid of the 70s and 80s despite the adult responsibilities that he just doesn't want to face. He's too old for this world, as a heart attack early on tells him; but he's also not fit for the "straight" life of working in a grocery store and being a father either.
Shot in Super 16 with a low-budget grungy vibe throughout, "The Wrestler" doesn't really do anything new apart from being (apparently) the first Hollywood drama about professional wrestling; you could slap most of the well-worn clichés here into most films about boxing, drag racing, etc and they'd be right at home. And a lot of the subtext is pretty obvious too; when Randy falls for a stripper (Marisa Tomei who must have made a pact with the devil to look the way she does at 44) we can see pretty readily that, unspoken or not, the themes of performance vs real life, acting a part and knowing when to stop acting, responsibility in the midst of still playing the childhood dream of being the macho guy or the gorgeous babe are going to reflect equally on both stars. And Randy's attempted reconciliation with his daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) is similarly predictable, though the scene where they go to the deserted and decrepit seaside town is pretty moving anyway.
I really didn't like Darren Aronofsky's previous film, "The Fountain" at all: pretentious, pretty for the sake of being pretty, full of grandiose ideas never really developed. "The Wrestler" is no question an attempt to take the opposite tack, and some people are calling it pretentious for the very reason that the director is trying something different! A ludicrous criticism if you ask me, and this film has a lot in common with both the gritty street scenes of his first two films ("Pi" and "Requiem for a Dream") and the overt redemptive story lines of "Requiem". It doesn't reach as far or as wide as any of his previous work, but in a great many respects it succeeds more fully in what it does attempt.
So you don't go into this for originality, you go into it for great acting and verisimilitude in the decaying Jersey atmosphere, and it succeeds phenomenally in those regards. The ending will disappoint some who want easy resolutions, but if it does they weren't paying attention; there are no easy answers here, and the choice of Bruce Springsteen to sing the title song at the end ought to make that much clear. Life is hard; all Randy can do, finally, is narrow it down to the one thing he loves that never let him down, whether it kills him or not, and all we can do is savor the moment.