The Wrestler

Rating R Genre drama Starring Mickey Rourke, Marisa Tomei, Evan Rachel Wood Directed by Darren Aronofsky Publisher Fox Searchlight

Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler is yet another spectacular picture from 2008. It is deeply emotional, personal, heart-rending, and compelling. It is also an enormously popular film despite its limited release, gathering large ticket sales wherever it is playing and generating Oscar buzz for Mickey Rourke, who already landed the Golden Globe for Best Actor. Luckily for fans of great movies everywhere, The Wrestler will see a wide release starting on January 23. See this movie.

The Wrestler is not about wrestling; it is about the emptying of one’s soul into existence. It is about work, it is about family, it is about loneliness, it is about age, it is about heartache. Rourke stars as Randy “The Ram” Robinson, but his real name is Robin Ramzinski. “Call me Randy,” he tells everyone. Randy is a professional wrestler – hence “The Ram” nickname – but he is twenty years past his prime. Back in the day, he was kind of a big deal. As we are introduced to The Ram, he wrestles on weekends in indie wrestling promotions and works a job at the supermarket to make ends meet.

Randy is a broken man. His body has been destroyed time and time again by years of hard living and misuse. He takes steroids and other drugs to keep up with the younger generation in the wrestling business. Loneliness plagues him, even though Randy is admired by his peers and has many connections. He spends his nights alone in his trailer and visiting a strip club where he flirts with Cassidy (Marisa Tomei). Cassidy is a single mother and she is also encountering the force of age on her profession, as customers don’t desire her as much as they used to and she doesn’t make as much money as the younger girls.

And so, Cassidy and Randy are kindred spirits passing each other by in this life. They are bound by the “rules” of their professions, crippled by how things need to be, and broken by how things are. As Randy continues to put his body through castigation, he eventually has a heart attack. In revaluation form, he decides to reach out to his alienated daughter (Evan Rachel Wood). He is too pathetic for her, though, and Randy’s unavoidable failings as a human being damage all hope at resolution. There are moments of transitory bliss between the two, but their relationship is bound for misery all the same.

Aronofsky’s The Wrestler examines these elements and tells a hurting yarn of burned bridges and a shattered subsistence. The director has taken us inside the world of a man who barely exists. He is celebrated in many ways, selling souvenirs and being recognized slinging deli meats at the supermarket. But in the ways that matter, The Ram is a ruined entity gradually slipping into nonexistence. The Wrestler is the exemplary story of a man’s fight to survive and a man’s fated severance from himself.

Much has been made about Mickey Rourke’s performance and for good reason. There aren’t enough words to describe what this actor has done here. He performs on multiple levels: physical, emotional, spiritual, and beyond. Rourke inhabits The Ram and creates him in order to break him down brick by brick, allowing the blood of disillusionment and failure to spill out of his immeasurable wounds. He is beyond broken and he cannot be fixed. Rourke’s ability to impart his character with futility is among the best acting I’ve seen in a long, long time.

The Wrestler is a film packed with detail, showing us the dim and seamy world of professional wrestling and showing us the human beings behind the curtain with dogged level-headedness. Aronofsky has put an incredible amount of care into this project. A movie about a wrestler, about a “fake industry,” is a giant risk for any director, but Aronofsky has pulled off a piece of work that is nothing short of an engrossing masterpiece. With dazzling performances, spotless direction, spectacular detail, and riveting tragedy, The Wrestler is simply incredible.