A Walloping Emotional Powerhouse

Rating: 10/10 (2 February 2009)

The Wrestler, a walloping emotional masterstroke, is about a man who can do one thing well, and doggedly continues to do it because of desperation, drowsy ability, and pride that always needs a lot of healing. He's a professional wrestler. From someone who feels like stabbing himself in the head whenever he sees pro-wrestling on TV, this remains one of the very best films of 2008. In a wrestling match, it's scripted that the villain blindsides the hero, who acts as if he doesn't see him, and body-slams him, but when the hero hits the floor, how does one fake that?
Mickey Rourke plays the haggard, impoverished, abandoned hero, Randy "The Ram" Robinson. This is the performance of his life. And I mean that in every way in which that sentence can be interpreted. This is Rourke doing breathtaking physical acting. He has the corporeality of a body builder, maybe owing to some steroids, which would also be appropriate of Randy. He gets into the ring and does the extremely bloody work. His ring performances and the abuse he endures cement the backbone for the story, which involves his estrangement from his daughter, played with chameleon-like persuasiveness by Evan Rachel Wood, and what he hopes will become a relationship with the stripper Cassidy, played by the great beacon of Italian-American godesshood Marisa Tomei, who never ages. Never ages! Except for his backstage brotherhood with other wrestling veterans, whose peripheral performances brilliantly discern between the big-hearted companionship backstage from the brutality on it, Randy has incinerates all his bonds.
Cassidy is as much a performer as Randy. They put on a show and give the customers what they want. It pays the rent. There is always a void between entertainers and their audiences. That's why so many of them marry each other. But Randy has become wiser in certain marginal respects with the years, less bedazzled by celebrity, more capable of accepting emotional longing. Randy has a residual friendliness and sweetness, which both helps and hurts him.
Beyond the overwhelmingly putrefied atmosphere, the most absorbing aspect in Darren Aronofsky's powerhouse drama is the backstage nuance of low-rung pro-wrestling. In the dreary snow and slop of New Jersey, Randy and his challengers make the rounds of dingy union halls, school gyms, community centers, using whatever they can find for makeshift dressing rooms, duct-taping their wounds, priming their pumps and agreeing minutes before a match on its script. We grasp how they make themselves bleed, concoct brutal "surprises," parley over each fight. And then the audience sees them. Their preparation merely sees that they get battered in the ways for which they prepare, and not in unanticipated ways.
I cared as deeply about Randy the Ram as any movie character I've seen this year. Machismo is something treated as inscrutable and distinctly characterized, and its residue cuts into all of us men, however macho we happen or choose to be. Aronofsky's manner of filming Rourke hand-held from behind powerfully signifies this. I have unqualified appreciation for an ubermasculine man with the physique and dominating sneer of Mickey Rourke who so unabashedly renders a tremendously muscular man in a profession that takes culturally induced machismo to the very extreme, and yet a man who can look behind his projected sense of self into a sentimental heart with needs, regrets and inferiorities. By the end, I was so mesmerized that I was surprised by the hard cut to black.