The Wrestler is a film that Mickey Rourke has been waiting to star in for most of his acting career. It’s a film about failure, loneliness, knowing that the best years of one’s life have long passed. Even in Rourke’s youth, when he blazed so fiercely and beautifully in Body Heat (1981), Rumblefish (1983) and Year of the Dragon (1985) he always had a rueful look in his eyes, as if he had caught sight of his destiny, as if he knew he could keep it at bay for only a while.
By the middle of the 1990s he was living that future. He had been arrested for spousal abuse. His decision to take up professional boxing had lost him his looks and, to judge from his slow and sometimes slurred voice on chat shows, part of his brain. His once shining career had sunk to such a level that he was reduced to sharing screen time with the likes of Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dennis Rodman in Double Team (1998).
In recent years, he has been virtually MIA, a John Travolta figure waiting for his own Quentin Tarantino to come along and restore his reputation. Actually, he was offered a part in Pulp Fiction (1994) – that of Butch Coolidge; after he turned it down, it went to Bruce Willis, an actor who has made his fortune by refining a lightweight, vanilla-flavoured version of the persona that Rourke has lived out for ruinous real.
Darren Aronofksy, a director making a comeback of his own after he followed his critically-esteemed Pi (1998) and Requiem For A Dream (2000) with the commercially unsuccessful The Fountain (2006), has pulled off something of a coup. Not only has he hauled Rourke from his self-pitying slump, but, working from a screenplay written by Robert D Siegel, he has created an often-brutal, always-compelling portrait of a decent man trying to peel himself off Skid Row.
Rourke plays Robin Ramzinski, known to older wrestling fans as Randy (the Ram) Robinson. He was at his peak back in the 1980s, a decade in which the hair metal music he loves was still popular. Now his body is criss-crossed with scars; he relies on painkillers and steroids to keep him in the ring; he fights in small-town venues picking up fees that barely cover the rent on his trailer-park home in Jersey. He hasn’t seen his daughter Stephanie (Evan Rachel Wood) for many years.
The Wrestler is less hyperactive than Aronofsky’s earlier films. It’s designed to resemble a documentary and achieves its goal of looking crummy so successfully that viewers may feel they’re taking a holiday in a dirty refrigerator. The pervasive, wheezy grottiness highlights the Ram’s fall from his former glories, and also captures the daily reality of most wrestlers’ lives.
And yet, in spite of all the grot and the poor money, and even after a younger opponent uses a staple gun on Ram that leads to him having a heart attack, the appeal of “grapple” never wanes. Randy is addicted to the ritual of fighting. He prefers its choreographed violence to the messiness of his personal life. Its “family” – of fellow wrestlers, of devoted spectators – is easier to handle than his real one. Unlike Cassidy (Marisa Tomei), his favourite stripper, he’s devoted to performing; he can’t imagine a life in which he can’t enjoy the fix of being “the Ram”.
The fight scenes are handled with a sweaty, bloodied intensity that makes them far less aesthetically appealing or even dramatic than Raging Bull or Rocky. Even when the Ram wins, the poundings he takes and the slowness with which he hobbles back to his dressing room mean that it’s hard to feel any pleasure or joy. We stare at Rourke and can’t help but wonder what wretched depths of personal experience he is mining.
And yet, even when he’s at his weariest and most beleaguered, there’s still the hint of a smile, both rueful and sexy, that seduces us. There’s also evidence of that comic talent that his tough-man reputation has always obscured: the scenes in which he does overtime at a deli counter – wearing a name tag that says “Robin” while his blond extensions are wrapped in a hair net; scooping egg mayonnaise into plastic tubs and slicing ham for elderly customers - are poignantly delightful.
The Wrestler doesn’t get everything right. The Ram’s relationship with Cassidy, while it does have the benefit of showcasing 44-year-old Tomei’s extraordinary body, feels almost as programmatic as his encounters with Stephanie. The film doesn’t – and maybe as a sports film, can’t – take us anywhere very surprising.
Rating: ****
