The Wrestler DVD

Film Reviews • Thursday April 30th, 2009 • 11:19 am

The Wrestler is more or less a Mickey Rourke biopic, and it’s a grainy, touching one.

“I’m an old, broken-down piece of meat, and I’m alone,” Rourke as Randy “The Ram” Robinson (holy alliteration!) says to his daughter Stephanie, played by Evan Rachel Wood. “And I deserve to be alone. I just don’t want you to hate me.”

Rest assured that this estranged spawn hates him. But then she’ll love him. And then hate him all over again. It’s his doing, or it was, when she was a child, and it’s not to be undone.

Rourke stalks through this film like a man both defeated and never overcome, wavy dyed-blond locks flying in the ring and then, off the mats, swept up atop his golden dome into something between a bun and a ponytail.

Sure, there’s the estranged-daughter cliché, and then we get the Oscar-baiting stripper with a heart of gold to boot. Marisa Tomei plays “Cassidy” (née Pam) at the club that Ram frequents after bouts. She’s as much a performer as he is, but that’s one crucial fact he constantly ignores, or doesn’t quite grasp. This Ram fella may be smart, or he may be fairly dim – the drugs and the hits may do that to a man – but he, and Rourke himself, are endowed with such sentimental, earnest charm so as to win over (or re-win) just about anyone, if for a time.

Says director Darren Aronofsky of the Rourke and Tomei characters: “The way a stripper works with her body and how a wrestler works with his body are very similar. They’re both up on stage; they both create a fantasy for the audience; they both have fake names. Age is their great enemy. So the parallels were very interesting.”

Ah, yes – the age factor. In the film’s most poignant scene, Ram coaxes Cassidy out for a drink after she agrees to help him clothes-shop for his daughter. (He’s a charmer but conversationally stilted: “I almost didn’t recognize you. You look clean.” Oof.) Waxing nostalgic about the ‘80s, Rourke/Ram says, “Then that Cobain pussy had to come around and ruin it. I tell you what, the ‘90s fuckin’ sucked.” Cassidy/Pam agrees. Rourke and Tomei themselves would also. And then, a kiss. But. “No contact with customers.” Tomei’s stripper may have a heart of gold embedded somewhere deep inside her, but the Ram either can’t discern whether it’s fool’s gold or doesn’t want to. Probably the latter. Wrestlers are gluttons for pain, no?

As screenwriter Robert Siegel explains in the film’s “Within the Ring” bonus feature, yes, the daughter and stripper characters/relationships are superficial and clichéd, but they’re mostly true, judging by his talks with “these guys,” the low-end men of the mats who just try to get by, and cope, and dope. Each seems to have these women in his life, as well as some skills as entertainer that he simply can’t break from, at least not until his body demands it.

Rourke/Ram deals with this from start to finish in this film. He and his wrestling brothers behind closed doors embrace and high-five one another, pop pills, inject ‘roids, run through each night’s show, and dress wounds. The actual wrestling/fight scenes are brutal, sometimes involving staple guns and shattered glass and tables heaping with barbed wire. “I’ve never gone through glass before,” says Rourke’s stunt double in the bonus feature. “Tables, barricades … never glass.”

Director Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain, Pi) here directs his fourth feature, this drastic departure The Wrestler. It’s nowhere near his other works, described by one producer in the bonus feature as “mind-fuck, head-trip psychedelic freakouts.” With a pigspittle budget the film was shot in 35 days in a Jersey dead winter. It’s a wonder it was made at all, but subtle miracles abound both behind and in front of the camera in this Rourke comeback vehicle.

Aronofsky behind the scenes calls his three principal actors “inventive,” and Wood describes “a lot of improvising” that went into performing her scenes with Rourke. Despite these strong performances – both Rourke and Tomei were nominated for acting Oscars for their work – the film isn’t granted any favors by a rather rudimentary, sometimes dumber-than-it-should-be script. It’s maybe writer Siegel’s second feature screenplay, according to IMDb.com. It shows. And so the direction, the actors, and even the cinematography – so many follow-behind, hand-held shots that lend a stark realism to the proceedings; “proactive documentary style,” Aronofsky calls it – are disserviced in the end by the material on paper.

But it’s on paper that the Ram should never have had a chance, anyway. A heart surgery and then heart surges and spurns delivered by both his daughter and his would-be lover all should have done him in. But, as one Tommy Rotten states matter-of-factly in the bonus feature, the most important thing in wrestling is to learn how to fall down. Rourke/Ram does that, with ferocity, never quite succumbs. He gets up. He does it again, in the ring and in love.

The film ends in fitting, decidedly postmodern fashion. The Ram’s frozen, suspended on the corner top-rope. He’s about to perform his patented jump-slam move one last time on longtime rival the Ayatollah, his ‘80s bane back for a 20th-anniversary bout. Will Ram even survive this fight, this very move? The camera goes behind the fierce mane and bulky body of this larger-than-life persona and man. Rourke/Ram had just told the adoring throng before the fight, “You are my family.” He means it. Now he sobs with agonized delight. The crowd barks and roars. He jumps. And a woman disappears.