This review first appeared in The Colorado Springs Gazette. To read this review at its original source, click here.
“After two years of working on the special effects in The Fountain, I realized I wanted to get back to the set, get back to people. For me, it’s all about the actors,” director Darren Aronofsky (Pi, Requiem for a Dream) told me over drinks in a Washington, D.C., hotel recently, elucidating why his latest work, The Wrestler, is so unlike anything he has done before. “Repeating yourself almost never works. I wanted to reinvent myself and do something completely different.” And so he has.
Once upon a time, Randy Robinson (Mickey Rourke) was the greatest wrestler there ever was. During an era of heavy metal hair bands, his image was forever immortalized in action figures and video games. Posters lionizing his deeds preceded him to gargantuan arenas around the world. That was then. This is now. Twenty years later, those glory days have long passed and the man once known as “The Ram” barely ekes out a living clashing with men half his age in school gyms and community centers before a mere handful of fans. Instead of expensive jewelry and fine clothes, Randy now sports knee and elbow braces, eyeglasses and an unwieldy hearing aid. He is, as he confesses, nothing but a “broken down piece of meat.”
After a heart attacks fells him and doctors inform him he could die if he ever enters the ring again, the burnt-out shell of his former self takes a job at a deli, deciding to finally set his tattered life in order. He attempts to reconnect with his estranged teenage daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) and tries to woo a local stripper named Cassidy (Marisa Tomei) to settle down with him — his regular lap dances comprise the most intimate and meaningful conversations of his week. But the siren call of the ring proves too seductive. When the prospect of a high profile rematch with his longtime nemesis, the Ayatollah, presents itself, Randy must weigh his all-too apparent mortality against his desire to hear the crowd roar his name one last time.
I’ve never really been a wrestling fan, a sentiment director Aronofsky told me he shares. But he was fascinated by the fickle nature of the celebrity limelight and when the concept for The Wrestler, a story he first conceived of after graduating from film school, came to mind again, he knew it was time to move forward with the project.
“Wrestling is closer to theater than athletics,” Aronofsky said. “We use wrestling, but the movie could really be about any form of celebrity.”
Specifically, what does one do once the celebrity limelight is switched off? F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that, “There are no second acts in American lives.” The Ram would have to agree. Randy and Cassidy, both beyond their professional expiration dates, make their livings as performers. However, when they each simultaneously hit a crossroad, she goes one way and he another. She chooses to crawl out of the grit and muck Aronofsky so evocatively shoots, documentary style, in a New Jersey of ever-increasing decay and decrepitation, while Randy has lived here so long, it would be like saying farewell to the only life he’s ever known. His glory days are more ephemeral dreams now than things of real substance, no matter how badly he wishes to return to them.
The Wrestler is a tragic story. Randy so craves the adulation that once fed and sustained him, that he can’t control his appetites and desires enough to legitimately change. Living on borrowed fame, Randy is like an insect caught in amber, frozen in a time that the world has long since left behind. Before the end, the gladiator will lose all he loves and all who love him. In the final minutes of the film, Randy stands atop the ring pylons and extends his arms to his side, ever-so briefly caught in the inadvertent pose of Christ crucified. It is an ironic moment given a speech Cassidy makes earlier in the film that begs us to ask just who does Randy’s sacrifice benefit?
When “The Ram” gives his farewell speech, listen closely to the words. They are not Randy’s so much as they are Mickey Rourke’s. The actor wrote them himself. It is precisely because Rourke’s own life so serendipitously and meticulously parallels that of the character he plays that makes The Wrestler so compelling and so heart-breakingly tragic.
Rourke doesn’t even look like himself anymore. He is Neanderthal, a flesh and blood caricature of his former self, more akin to his prosthetically enhanced, square-jawed character in Sin City than an actual human being. While some have hinted at extensive plastic surgery, Rourke claims years spent competitively in the boxing ring (he too was told to stop or risk death) have laid waste to his once fine, leading man looks and he has the numerous nose operations, cartilage replacements, shattered cheekbones, short-term memory loss and wonky equilibrium to prove it.
Alone most of his time on screen, Rourke fills the silence with sighs and long, protracted exhalations of despair and hopelessness. It is Randy’s primary form of communication, though he is the only one listening. Rourke’s performance is raw and oozing. He is a hulking presence with a crushed, teddy bear heart. He wants desperately to do the right thing, but like an addict, simply cannot. Just one more time. If I can hear them call out my name just one more time I can quit happy.
It’s hard to emphasize how amazing Mickey Rourke’s performance is. It’s difficult to extol the second coming of Mickey Rourke when he never truly had a first coming. The star of Body Heat, Rumble Fish, The Pope of Greenwich Village and Diner was viewed as the next, great actor of his generation until he poured his fame, fortune and professional goodwill into a spiral of calamitous self-destruction. In-fighting with producers, roles taken only for profane amounts of cash, wild living, trouble with the law, and an unraveling, drug-saturated marriage all contributed to Rourke’s titanic flameout. No one thought he would ever work in Hollywood again, much less stage a comeback. But that is exactly what has happened. Rourke may be living the second act his character never could.
© Copyright 2008 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.
