The Wrestler

Finally got around to seeing Darren Aronofsky’s latest picture tonight after work, and it’s got me thinking about two other pictures - Aronofsky’s own Requiem For A Dream - to which The Wrestler bears some uncanny thematic similarities - and last year’s There Will Be Blood, from P.T. Anderson, which is similar to Aronofsky’s latest in that it’s largely a showcase for one particular actor.

The story is of Randy “The Ram” Robinson (Mickey Rourke, in a role that’s probably going to win him an Oscar Sunday night), a professional wrestler who is past even the twilight of his career. Twenty years ago, he headlined Madison Square Garden in a now-legendary match against the Ayatollah - and now he’s making the rounds of east coast regional circuits and contemplating a nostalgic repeat of his classic match with the Ayatollah.

(There are echoes here of the real-life match between Hulk Hogan and the Iron Sheik from back in the eighties. Hogan won the match, and the WWF title - and thereby set the stage for the massive explosion of popularity that professional wrestling enjoyed in the late eighties and early nineties, and which it is still enjoying, to a somewhat lesser degree, today.)

Then he has a heart attack, and now it’s time to take stock of his life and finally look full in the face all of the important things he has, to varying degrees, been ignoring all his life as he tried - and failed - to make a living in the ring. This consists primarily of making peace with his estranged daughter Stephanie (Evan Rachel Wood) and making it known to the stripper, Cassidy (Marisa Tomei), he’s in love with that he is, in fact, in love with her.

All of it weighs on Randy, and Rourke brings this off brilliantly, with heavy, sad eyes, weary voice, and an air of resignation that hangs over him like a shroud. He goes through the motions of getting a job, calling on his daughter, and making awkward advances toward Cassidy; but the effort is Sisyphian, especially with respect to Stephanie. He manages to break through the space between their lives by buying her a present that Cassidy helps pick out - but then he misses a dinner date that he makes with her because he winds up partying with a girl he meets after Cassidy rejects one of his advances.

If the basic argument here sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same thing that happened to the Jared Leto and Marlon Wayans characters in Requiem For A Dream. Their addiction was smack - Randy’s is wrestling. It’s all he is, all he knows how to be - and the cruel irony is that the heart attack didn’t kill him; instead, it damaged him just enough to make him realize that everything he gave up for wrestling is all that he has left. Unfortunately, he doesn’t know what to do with any of it, and we get to watch the inexorable pull of the ring as he runs into more and more dead ends in his post-wrestling life. (Actually, that’s not exactly true - he does know what to do with all of those things he has now instead of wrestling; he just doesn’t know how to do any of them very well.)

Much of the film plays like a documentary, which I think is due to three major factors. The first is the film’s style - grainy photography, close shots, and handheld cameras (though not nearly as pervasive - nor as jarring - as those employed in Rachel Getting Married) that foster a feeling of gritty realism. The second is the virtually complete lack of melodrama - these are just real people trying to do the best they can, and failing more often than not. None of the characters in this film have any delusions of grandeur - nor are they made to appear as though they do when they obviously do not. The third, of course, is the ghost of Rourke’s own checkered past, which includes, most importantly, a largely unrealized potential as an actor. To the extent that this film works, I don’t think it’s unfair to say that it could not have worked without someone such as Rourke playing the lead.

That being said, however, the film is not without its flaws - the ending being foremost among them. (And this from someone who was a-okay with the abrupt ending of No Country For Old Men.) It’s pretty clear what’s going to happen to Randy, but waiting there in the wings - literally - is Cassidy, who is ultimately a stronger character than Randy because she does what he is unable to do. She walks off the stage in the middle of her set and goes to see Randy in his rematch with the Ayatollah - and in doing so breaks out of the funk that has become her own life. It could be argued that Randy remains true to himself by going back to wresting, even though he knows it will probably kill him; but the self to which he remains true is an incomplete, lesser self - and he chooses to remain that lesser self, despite the fact that his efforts to rise above it are sincere, if not motivated by his own designs.

I’m not arguing that there should have been a happy ending - nor even that there should have been a more complete, which is to say resolved, ending; but I think that Cassidy gets short shrift being left in the background as Randy takes to the ring. Marisa Tomei is up for an Oscar for this role, though she won’t win; and I don’t know that an extra scene at the end, giving a sense of where her character goes next, would have been enough to win a second surprising Oscar for her - but it would have gone a long way toward making The Wrestler a more satisfying film.