Bottom line: Mickey Rourke's spectacular comeback performance supercharges a conventional sports tale
Grade (on a 1-10 scale): 7.5
In most movies, even a superlative performance by an actor is secondary; it exists to support the greater whole. In a few movies, though, a brilliant performance is primary – the rest of the film depends on its catalytic revelations.
Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler belongs to the latter group. In it, the incorrigible Mickey Rourke plays an over-the-hill professional wrestler with the kind of fierce, gutsy, mesmerizing incandescence that bears comparison to celebrated performances such as Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Robert De Niro in Raging Bull.
The normally ridiculous Golden Globes charade redeemed itself momentarily this year in giving Rourke its Best Actor trophy. I’m rooting for him to cop the same prize at the upcoming Oscars, where his performance is easily the most stunning of the several excellent actors nominated.
The one downside in all of this is that Rourke’s work unquestionably outshines everything around it. Though directed with great fluency and texture by Aronofsky, The Wrestler is an earnest, unsurprising sports drama distinguished mainly by the fact that it depicts a “sport” that many people (like yours truly) would forever put in skeptical quotes, one that’s received precious little screen treatment previously.
Admittedly, I was not always skeptical about “Championship Wrestling” (as our local variety was called). At age 10 or 11, I was completely delighted and entranced by the antics of figures like Ric Flair and Haystack Calhoun, their straight-into-the-camera tirades and promises of mayhem, their almost supernatural leaps though the air and ability to withstand blows that seemingly could obliterate Samson himself.
“Professional” (or better: theatrical) wrestling seems to exist to animate the imaginations of 10-year-old boys everywhere with fantasies of heroic brawn and unshakable moral absolutes. That many adult fans apparently don’t question its ruses lends dismaying support to P.T. Barnum’s estimation of American credulousness. Even for those (including former fans) who do see through the travesty, wrestling exercises an inevitable fascination as the place where showbiz tawdriness conclusively trumps the ideals of athleticism - and where a subculture of simulation feeds off of our own childish dreams. Who hasn’t wondered about the off-camera lives of these snarling behemoths?
Randy “the Ram” Robinson (Rourke), the title character in Aronofsky’s film, is 20 years past his prime. You can tell he was once a star because he still carries himself like one, and when he runs across a fan who recalls his 80s glory, his face lights up with a champ’s indomitable grin. But Randy’s time in the ring is fast running out, and so are his options. He tries to keep up appearances, rocking out to speed metal in his van to get his spirits pumped. But when he gets home, his trailer is locked for non-payment of rent.
This is a great character for a movie, but what do you do with him? In the genre The Wrestler inhabits – the washed-up sports hero movie – there are precious few narrative paradigms, and Robert Siegel’s screenplay, though pleasingly idiomatic, isn’t up to reinventing the generic wheel. It offers a gritty, mutedly sentimental account of Randy’s hardships and relationships with two women, an aging stripper (Marisa Tomei) and his estranged daughter (Raleigh native Evan Rachel Wood), and naturally, it shows him trying to mount a comeback of sorts. You expected him to fight space aliens?
Still, in most movies about craftsmen, the most interesting thing is the guy practicing his craft, and so it is here. Considered as a pseudo-documentary that’s not trying to debunk, discredit or expose the wrestler’s craft - simply showing it as the difficult job it is - The Wrestler shines: Its best scenes are the ones in or near the ring. Trailed by a handheld camera, Randy joshes and calmly works out routines with his collegial colleagues, then plunges into the fray aiming to put on the most spectacular show he can.
The matches in The Wrestler are truly riveting, and in some cases astonishing. For anyone who thinks that boxing is a dangerous sport and “fake” wrestling essentially safe, here’s an instant corrective. The wrestlers go at it expecting, even courting and choreographing, bloody injury – using everything from hidden razor to staplers.
The reason all this remains dramatically compelling is, quite simply, Mickey Rourke. As if hungry to revive his own long-flagging career – the autobiographical subtext never disappears for long – the actor has transformed himself entirely, pumping his body up with steroids and weights - peroxiding his long, permed locks till he locks like a refugee from Spinal Tap. The fight scenes he enters are staged using long takes and, obviously, no doubles or stunt men. The punishment Randy takes is inflicted on a very real Mickey Rourke. It may be “fake,” but it plays like art.
And Randy finally is not simply a mass of muscle and stimulants. Although the script puts the character through fairly conventional paces, Rourke opens a window into his soul. You may not come away caring deeply about him, but you believe him through and through. It is a magnificent performance.
