Beautiful loser

Rating: 9/10 (20 January 2009)

The late Kevin DuBrow was right: metal health will drive you mad. To the pile-driving strains of Quiet Riot, the filmmaker aptly demonstrates how fame is often a fleeting thing, ephemeral like a promotional flyer; fame left Randy "The Ram" Robinson(Mickey O'Rourke) years ago, seemingly, in a heartbeat, or the time it takes for a hit record to run its course. After the needles takes leave of the groove, there is silence, there is the memory of the song. Alone backstage, on a metal folding chair, we meet Randy, a middle-aged man whose muscle-bound body is clearly entering its winter season. Preparing himself for his latest match, the viewer is made to feel like an intruder, as the wrestler keeps his back to us. Unlike most current films, the camera is used to convey information about the subject; in "The Wrestler", in the next scene, Randy's back continues to keep us at bay, while the camera follows him into the gym, where his adoring public, mostly middle-aged men, await the wrestler for a quick picture and autograph as reminders of their vanishing youth. These people, his fan-base, don't judge the aging wrestler like we do. To them, in their eyes, this ramshackle man is still "The Ram", and not the carnie sideshow attraction who knows his best days are behind him. That is the significance of the relationship between the camera and its subject; to show how Randy's best days are behind him. While professional wrestling may not be riding the surf of popularity as it did back in the eighties, it persists as a subculture in which Randy can relive his glory days, and surround himself with the flotsam and jetsam of eighties excess.
Professional wrestling as we all know is largely choreographed; its matches are predetermined, but to call the sport fake is hardly apt; it's entertainment, like a dance routine, but with bleeding and the perchance for paralysis. Wrestling's duality, as both exhibition and athletic corporeality, finds perfect expression in Randy's self-inflicted cutting of his forehead, during a rigorous bout where both wrestlers convince us that something real is going on. This willingness to hurt himself, on purpose, mirrors the scene, later in the film, when Randy misses his dinner date with Stephanie(Evan Rachel Woods). He hurts the Mohawked wrestler; he hurts his estranged daughter; he hurts himself, as he will always be doomed to do. Randy not only wrestles professionally, he wrestles personally too, which makes "The Wrestler" sound like an update of the screenplay that Barton Fink(John Turturro) tries to sneak past the studio head(Michael Lerner) in the Joel and Ethan Coen film that took Cannes by storm in 1991. It's not the genre film that Jack Lipnick commissioned the novice scribe to write, as the screenplay becomes Fink-like by using wrestling as a metaphor for the way Randy conducts his life.
In the film's best scene, Randy takes Stephanie to the beach; he points to the ghosts of Coney Island, which leads them to an abandoned, derelict ballroom, where father and daughter dance with only the seaboard air to accompany their first shy steps as a reconciled family. Unfortunately, the music suggested by the setting, given the context of Randy's bacchanal past, is AC/DC's "Big Balls"(everybody now, for Bon: "And we've got the biggest/balls of them all!"), so we know, something will go awry. And it does, because in Stephanie's words, dad is a "f***-up". Although he purposely cuts his thumb on a slicer, the more obvious echo to his first self-inflicted cutting, standing up Stephanie causes more bleeding than his mishap in the supermarket ever could. Like a confab with his wrestling opponent, after their brief encounter at the seashore, "The Ram" tells "The Goth" what he's going to do beforehand. But in the biggest irony of them all, Randy pulls off a move that his beleaguered daughter wasn't expecting.
Randy f****-up again, late in the film, when he returns to the ring, against doctor's orders, against stripper's orders, too. In John Avildsen's "Rocky", Adrian(Talia Shire) can't watch the pugilist fight because she loves him too much. Cassidy(Marisa Tomei), on the other hand, leaves the gymnasium, because she doesn't love him enough. He's like a narcissistic Jesus Christ; he's dying for his own sins. In a career-topping performance, Mickey O'Rourke plays a man who is wrestling himself. And loses. For real.