'The Wrestler' - A Wrestling Movie That's Totally About Wrestling

Rating: 9/10 (17 February 2009)

Oddly enough, when I think of professional wrestling, I think of the old slapstick comedies of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. A lot of their earliest comedies were hilarious but remarkably violent. But like pro wrestling, it's all staged, right? In the extra features on the DVD of Benny & Joon, in which Johnny Depp does remarkable impersonations of Chaplin, Depp mentions that studying the moves of Chaplin was like going to "jump school." The moves they do are not real, the violence isn't real, but the actual physical activity of it all is as real as anything else. Whenever I watch the old Chaplin movies, I always imagine what the rehearsals were like, and that is one of the things about professional wrestling that we see in The Wrestler.
Mickey Rourke gives a powerful and personal performance as the washed up wrestler Randy "The Ram" Robinson. Rourke has a turbulent past himself, including a brief stint as a professional boxer and his own fall from stardom and eventual comeback because, like Randy The Ram, this is just what he does. And in Randy's case, it's clear how badly he needs wrestling because he really doesn't know anything else.
The movie opens with a weary Randy resting after a match receiving a disappointing pay from a tiny show. His wrestling superstar past is revealed during the opening credits, and then we meet him as an older man playing small wrestling shows and just trying to make ends meet. He understands that he's nothing like what he used to be, but he also knows that he needs to survive and this is the only way he knows how to do it. He's no longer a tough guy in his 20's or 30's, he's an old guy just going to work, and his body is starting to get tired.
But unlike most sports movies, the wrestling scenes are not meant to serve the purpose of creating excitement or illustrating the sport that the movie is centered around, they are meant to illustrate the reality of the sport that defines the main character's life. We see the nuts and bolts of how an aging wrestler keeps himself in shape enough to get in the ring and make a spectacle of himself. He goes to the hair salon to keep his hair bleached and flowing, he makes complicated transactions with a muscle-bound meathead to get the drugs he needs to stay in what is undeniably incredible physical shape, but he also wears a hearing aid and thick reading glasses.
But his struggles with his aging body and his gradual descent from any kind of wrestling stardom is given meaning by its juxtaposition with his personal life, which involves an estranged daughter and a curious relationship with an exotic dancer at a local strip club, in whom he clearly has a unique interest. Randy discovers that he has lived the life of a wrestling superstar and has finished without so much as a significant other or a daughter who wants anything to do with him. He has lived a lifetime of mistakes and the physical toll that his profession takes on him makes him finally realize that he needs to reexamine his life and re-prioritize.
The performance by Evan Rachel Wood, I have to say, is remarkably bad. She has an emotional scene late in the film that reminds me of something I would expect to see in a high school play, but the relationship between Cassidy (the stripper played remarkably by Marisa Tomei) and Randy and the parallel nature of their lives give the film a depth that it would not otherwise have reached. Essentially they play exactly the same role in life. He is an aging wrestler who's income depends on the peakness of his physique, and she is a stripper who's income also depends on the peakness of her physique. Both of them are reaching a point in their lives where they have to do something totally different, and neither of them has any idea where to begin.
But the best thing that the movie does is that it humanizes those towering masses of raging muscle that we see in the ring in professional wrestling shows. Personally I am absolutely mystified as to the attraction of such nonsense, but like anyone in show business, from strippers to wrestlers to actors, when the show stops they become people like the rest of us.
Evan Rachel Wood, who plays Randy's daughter in the movie, is also dating Marilyn Manson, who has to be one of the freakiest guys ever to get in front of a camera or microphone, although he defined one of the central messages of the movie when he once said, "You know, it you take away all the costumes and scary make-up, we're just a bunch of regular guys."