The Wrestler | The Empire Blog

The Wrestler

Posted on Friday September 5, 2008, 00:16 by Damon Wise in Under The Radar

“The first glimmer of hope in the whole fucking festival,” sighed Helen as we left the PalaLido after the second press screening of The Wrestler. Word was already coming in from the first one, in the half-hour gap between the two, and, thank God, it was good. And 100 minutes I later I had to agree. Mickey Rourke is absolutely sensational as Randy 'The Ram' Robinson, a faded wrestling star coming to terms with his mortality and his empty life. “I'm just an old, broken down piece of of meat,” he tells his estranged daughter Stephanie (Evan Rachel Wood). Coincidentally, I met Rourke at the Rachel Getting Married party on Wednesday, and I was surprised to find him very charming, very friendly and disarmingly approachable in a way that I hadn't expected. There's a lot of his real personality, I feel then, in The Wrestler, a film that plays like a Rocky movie for children of the 80s, but with a greater willingness to explore the dark side of its antihero.

After a montage of memorabilia from The Ram's heyday – scored with the poodle rock of Quiet Riot's '(Bang Your Head) Metal Health', we first see Randy in a children's classroom that is doubling as a dressing room. He makes less money than he's been promised because the gate's not been good, and he returns to his trailer to find that his landlord has changed the locks. So far it's not pretty, and it's about to get even uglier: Randy shows up for a booking that could be a scene from Hostel 2, fighting a sad-masochistic opponent who attacks him with a staple-gun and a fork, causing lacerations that have to be glued back together. Randy has sunk pretty low but he doesn't care; as he says later, this is his world and he has nothing outside it – like the stripper 'Cassidy' (Marisa Tomei), whom he worships, Randy is about to find that his work life and private life cannot coexist.

The turning point is Randy's heart attack, which forces him to pull out of an impending fight, a 20-years-later rematch that he'd hoped would re-energise his career. Instead, Rourke tries to put his affairs in order, visiting his daughter, trying to settle down with 'Cassidy' (who's real name is Pam, just as Randy's real name is Robin) and getting a higher paid job behind the deli counter in a supermarket. And if this sounds very low-key, it is. There's very little camera trickery from director Darren Aronofsky, and there's only one mild attempt to break out of linear narrative. It is, however, recognisably the work of the man who made The Fountain and Requiem For A Dream. Like the former it's a film about death and immortality, and like the latter it's about the human capacity for self-abasement, which is vividly expressed in the bloody staple-gun fight. But these are expressed by the cast, not Aronofsky's camera, in looks and words, but it's hard to pick out the film's best scene because there are several. Perhaps my favourite is the scene where Randy starts work behind the deli and slowly turns it into a performance. But then I also like the scene in the clothes shop, where he's shopping for his daughter, and the scene in the bar where he pines for 80s metal...

Ultimately, this is Rourke's film through and through, and it's not hard to see what must be painful (for him) echoes of his own career. But it's never sentimental; even when his legs are wobbling, we're rooting for Randy because we believe he can, and will do it one day. And if you've ever felt that way about Mickey Rourke, believe me, you're going to love this movie. I did.