The 80s

Rating: 10/10 (8 March 2009)

Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain. You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today and then one day you find ten years have got behind you, no one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.

And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but it's sinking. And racing around to come up behind you again. The sun is the same in the relative way, but you're older, shorter of breath and one day closer to death. -
Time, 20 years ago, the 80s, good times or bad times but unique times for sure. Guns N' Roses' track from their album Appetite for Destruction "Sweet Child O' Mine" reached the #1 position of the Billboard hot 100 and like Guns N' Roses' our main character was in the 80s at the top of his career, as a professional wrestler Randy "The Ram" Robinson (Mickey Rourke) had a tremendous time during the 80s, memorable matches, success. At one point we have Randy and his friend (Marisa Tomei) hanging in a bar, they have a similar taste for music and Randy says something like "I hated the f****** 90s" and also stuff against Cobain. We can imagine that Randy said that not only in reference to the music but also to how he lived during the decade after his best decade as a professional wrestler.
The present for Randy consist in living alone, working at a supermarket and wrestling during the weekends at local small places. Three wrestling matches in the film; we certainly take a look inside the world of wrestling, we see how there is a big respect to Randy from all the wrestlers we see, the respect is mutual, after all they all are colleagues. As you know pro wrestling is a show, here there's always the previous chat between Randy and his next rival about what they are going to do for the audience (there's also that detail of Randy cutting himself). Personally I like pro wrestling, I enjoy sometimes the whole show (and the movies of Santo and Blue Demon!) but I don't really have a favourite wrestler, I'm just not a big fan, I can't be. Anyway, here especially with the second match we see pro wrestling as nothing but a real thing, I like this part of Roger Ebert's review of The Wrestler: "Pro wrestling is a fake sport, right? Yes, but as an activity, it's pretty real. It's scripted that the villain sneaks up on the hero, who pretends not to see him, and pushes him over the ropes and out of the ring. Fake. But when the hero hits the floor, how fake is that? "Those guys learn how to fall," people tell me. Want to sign up for the lessons?". That mentioned second match is an extreme one, a delight for the fans (a really fantastic little moment when Randy please his fans by using the prosthetic leg of one of them, who is the happiest fan in the place, to hit his rival!) but after this match we are pretty sure the days of Randy as a professional wrestler are over. The situation in the present days of Randy was always difficult, how a once very successful professional wrestler ended suffering to pay the rent is not for our interest, the only thing we have now is that a man has nothing but more disappointments during an already difficult period of his life. Now the body says "no more"; a situation like the bypass operation that had Randy, as Marisa Tomei's characters remarks, usually bring people together.
I haven't seen yet Gus Van Sant's Milk, actually I don't really want to see it (I only really want to see, from those movies that are right now in theaters, Watchmen and Clint Eastwood's Changeling). I'm writing this in reference to what happened exactly two weeks ago in the Oscars, certainly Rourke was the favourite and with that you know that enough has been said about how Rourke resurrected with this project. He is GREAT, I didn't expect less. Marisa Tomei plays the character of the striper who has this special relation with one of her customers who is of course Randy. Tomei is really good but for me is not a great performance (still she deserved the damn Oscar just for those lap dance scenes). Certainly these two, Randy and Pam, share things (there's this one scene in which some customers don't want Pam since she is old. Also Pam has a son), and there's that thing with Pam saying: "I can't, you're just another customer, I can't be with customers" and Randy responding "well I'm a customer then I want a f****** dance". She is also the one who will lead is know that Randy has a daughter (good performance of beautiful Evan Rachel Wood), probably of the thing that Randy is more regretful about is that he practically abandoned his daughter, now we know Randy and we had been following him so we know he really want the best for the difficult relation with his daughter and there's that moment after for once Randy saw something outside a ring, pretty much a damn unfortunate moment that will make that Randy sees the wresting world again as his only world. Not entirely a masterpiece but The Wrestler is just another worth watching work from Darren Aronofsky.