An honest film, often funny and quite intimate

Rating: 9/10 (26 April 2009)

In wrestling as in show business, the name of the game is performance. No longer considered to be a sport, wrestling is now a mixture of violent pantomime and self-destruction in the name of entertainment. In Darren Aronofsky's fourth film, The Wrestler, Mickey Rourke plays Randy "The Ram" Robinson, a professional wrestler who has seen better days. Twenty years after a wrestling career that generated posters, "Randy The Ram" action figures and a video game, he is unable to compete in major tournaments and barely able to maintain a run down trailer in a New Jersey suburb. Randy, now a beaten-up relic of his former self, can only compete with younger performers in amateur contests, battering his body further by crashing into glass, being stapled by staple guns, and ingesting painkillers and steroids.
In his first film since the under-appreciated The Fountain, Aronofsky has created a powerful and involving drama in which Mickey Rourke's performance is a tour-de-force reminiscent of Robert de Niro in Raging Bull. Rourke, on the comeback trail after a boxing career and reconstructive surgery on his face, is completely believable as the washed-up wrestler whose only companions are loneliness and remorse. To a background of eighties metal rock, Randy drives around town in a Dodge Ram van that holds an action figure of himself on the dashboard. During the week he loads boxes and mans the deli counter at the Acme supermarket in New Jersey, while on the weekends he performs at American Legion halls in the ridiculous costumes that wrestlers wear.
Written by Robert Siegel, a former editor of "The Onion", the film has two subplots which divert our attention from the physical violence only to endure pain of a different sort, the kind in which the bleeding comes from the heart. One features Marisa Tomei as a fortyish stripper and lap dancer named Cassidy who, in spite of Randy's persistence, refuses to treat him as anything other than a paying customer. Trying to raise a nine-year old boy by herself, Cassidy is another example of someone who knows that she should quit but is forced by economic circumstances to go on.
The other sub-plot revolves around Randy's estranged daughter Stephanie (Evan Rachel Wood) who lives with a surly black woman and is most unwelcome to Randy's overtures for reconciliation. Understandably bitter over her father's abandonment of the family when she needed him the most, Stephanie softens enough to go on an outing with her dad but any attempt at a new beginning is squashed when Randy does not show up for a lunch date. Although the offense does not seem that grievous to us, given the extent of Stephanie's anger, if it wasn't this incident, it would probably have been another.
Aronofsky shows the consequences of all the body slamming, physical bludgeoning, and cuttings with razor blades in the form of a heart attack that overcomes Randy after a match. The film is predictable in the sense that, after Randy's heart attack and emotional end to his job in the deli counter, we still sense that his pain will not be too great to opt for a major comeback. Yet to the extent that we are drawn into Randy's character, want him to succeed, yet do not know where the film will ultimately take us, The Wrestler delivers very satisfying results. Though violent and ugly at times, it is an honest film, often funny and quite intimate, a film that anyone who has suffered humiliation at some point in their life can relate to. Here there is no triumph of victory or agony of defeat, only life in all its pain and all its grace.