The Wrestler
Dir: Darren Aronofsky
Rating: 4.5
Fox Searchlight
109 Minutes
Professional wrestling is not “real”: that’s the worst-kept secret in sports entertainment. About a decade ago on an NBC news special, WWE President Vince McMahon scoffed at the notion, pointing out that a performance of Hamlet isn’t exactly “real,” either. While the comparison of WWE to Shakespeare might seem a bit pretentious, McMahon has a point. Pro wrestling is Shakespeare stripped of iambic pentameter, distilled to the jokes and fighting that connected with the groundlings at the Globe Theatre in Elizabethan England — the Working Man’s theatre.
The luxury of staged matches doesn’t mean that pro wrestlers have cushy jobs. A wrestler abuses his body for a couple decades (if he doesn’t end up dying young as so many do) with steroids and falling through tables only to end up a burnout with no job security and, in many cases, a life in shambles. This is the story that director Darren Aronofsky, screenwriter (and former Onion editor-in-chief) Robert D. Siegel, and star Mickey Rourke tell in The Wrestler, a working man’s tragedy for the pro wrestling set.
It is easy to identify with a character that is like you. Darren Aronofsky boasted in a Q&A that the film made “Rowdy” Roddy Piper — a guy who fought aliens in They Live – cry like a baby at the “truth” of the movie. That’s fantastic, but can you make an ectomorphic writer care about an aging pro wrestler? And can Darren Aronofsky deliver under the circumstances: a film with script that he hasn’t written, starring a guy who’s hardly a bankable movie star, without Aronofsky’s trademark style?
The answer is yes.
The Wrestler is a film about a man who takes risks with his body and health to make a semi-decent living while Aronofsky himself takes risks as a filmmaker. Instead of his usual camera tricks and hip-hop-influenced editing, Aronofsky chooses to shoot in a gritty verité style that allows Rourke to improvise to his heart’s content. For example, instead of perhaps opening with a “camera mounted on the chest” sequence of Mickey Rourke ambling back to the locker room after a rigorous match, Aronofsky opens with a static camera in a corner of the room observing from a distance weary Rourke sitting in what appears to be an elementary school classroom, feeling more like a documentary than Requiem for a Dream. This is not a filmmaker doing something different to show his versatility; this is a filmmaker doing something different because it’s appropriate.
Despite all this talk of filmmaking and auteurism, The Wrestler hinges on Rourke’s performance. If he isn’t believable as the title character, then the film has no hope of working. Anyone can have big muscles and antique wrestler hair helps matters, but Rourke disappears into the character of Randy “The Ram” Ramsey, a man who can go from warm and friendly to a frustrated, broken failure in mere moments.
What makes The Wrestler great is the depiction of Randy not as a “bad” person, but as a real person. A man who uses steroids to maintain his deteriorating body, gets into fights at strip clubs, and consistently disappoints his estranged daughter can still be good with kids (just not his own) and maintain a lively atmosphere as a supermarket deli worker — the best scene of the film thanks to Rourke’s improvisation. Despite his faults Randy never ceases to be an engrossing character as he struggles to live in a world that has little use for him.
Who knew such pathos could come from a story about a “fake” sport?
by Danny Djeljosevic
