Review: The Wrestler

POSTED BY Max Powers | WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 19 AT 12:04 PST

The Wrestler

I walked out of the theatre from this movie feeling like I had a metal chair smashed over my face after being suplexd onto a mat covered in broken lightbulbs. And I mean that in the best possible way. The wrestler brings a level of intensity that you don’t often experience these days. It just hurt so good.

The Matchup
It’s important to know that this movie is as much about plot as is any classic wrestling match. For the sake of condensation here’s how it goes. An aging wrestler is driven further into isolation as an injury forces him to retire. He tries to fill the void left by his exit from the ring by reacquainting himself with his estranged daughter and courting his most favorite stripper. After the real world becomes way more brutal than any number of chairs to the face he makes one final go at glory.

What I thought
The big story surrounding the Wrestler since it won the belt at the Venice Film Festival was the performance of Mickey Rourke, an enigmatic, surgically altered narcissist plucked out of a dead end career who seemed beyond resuscitation by Hollywood standards. There was talk about how Aronofsky —a director known for his often firebrand style-- sat Rourke down when they first met, told him to shut his fucking mouth and listen and he would win him an Oscar. It’s a story of two monumental egos managing to work together to create something huge. Within this collaboration It’s almost impossible to parse what’s good acting on the part of Rourke and what’s superb direction on the part of Aronofsky. The reality is that it is an amazing blend of both, and whatever tough talk happened the two needed each other to pull this shit off.

Rourke embodies a broken pro wrestler because he’s been a broken actor who was once a pro boxer. Drugs played a part in his meltdown in real life and play a part in his ultimate demise in the movie. He had a heyday but for the past few years he’s played only enough small roles to be recognized in line at Whole Foods. He never reached the pinnacle to which he aspired. Rourke wanted to be great.

The reason it works is because lives like Rourke’s are the specialty of Aronofsky’s cinematic knife. He specializes in taking the fascinations of utterly determined eccentrics and dissecting how it lead to their destructions. If it’s solving the stock market, getting on a game show, finding a cure for cancer Aronofsky has a penchant for convincing you that talent is nothing more than a curse that will get you strung out on diet pills, covered in staples, or self-lobotomized by a DeWalt paddle bit.

Movies get good when the line between fiction and reality is blurred. This is the reason that Aronofsky just joined the ranks of our generation’s great directors. His choice of using Rourke was the kind of decision that defines the title of greatness. It’s the understanding that the best works of fiction are created by real people covered in genuine blood, sweat, and the painful passage of years. See this movie. 9.5/10

MAX POWERS

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Says:
November 19th, 2008 at 03:59 pm this movie looks awesome DEGENERATION X!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

KilgoreTrout Says:
December 26th, 2008 at 01:02 pm This movie rules. Rourke's portrayal of "The Ram" is incredible. Aronofsky's finally got his head out of his wife's ass (The Fountain) and back in the ring with this epic flick. catch it.

AgentoftheBat Says:
January 30th, 2009 at 08:44 pm Rourke was too good in this. I'm convinced he was actually a professional wrestler somewhere along the line.

Says:
March 22nd, 2009 at 07:30 am Rourke's performance was great but the movie sucked. Void of hope and full of despair, I found the movie to be one of the worst movies I've ever seen. Critics loved it because they've never seen the inner workings of the low level independent wrestling scenes so it was a totally new environment for them. But Rourke, as a sympathetic figure, does not work. Randy "the Ram" was, at one time, a big time pro wrestler who got too old to be a star. But he was the only one who didn't see it. He ends up living in a trailer, where he couldn't pay the rent, and almost gets evicted but he has no trouble in laying down $60 for a 5 minute lap dance from a stripper who's also seen her best days. Top that with having left his daughter when she was 4 years old and being a dope head, you can see that most of Randy's problems are self induced. Later on he has a heart attack, wears a hearing aid, and was told to never enter a wrestling ring again. But he still thinks he can recapture the magic of his youth health be damned. Randy was a nobody on the street as he should have been being the piece of human garbage that he is but he was somebody in the ring because his human frailties weren't on display. He went to work as a server behind a deli counter because he has no other marketable skills to present to an employer. Rany only knew one thing. Wrestling and he was too old and washed up to to make any money from that. I did not feel sorry for Randy and anybody who did should be banned from ever watching movies again. If Randy the Ram had been musician, a singer, a teacher...who had fallen on hard time...the comeback may have been believable. But in a job that entails physicality and youthfulness, both Aronofsky and Rourke both fall short. The finish of the movie was probably the worst and the lamest finish of any movie ever made. Nobody knows what happened to Randy the Ram when he was having another heart attack in his last match with his arch nemesis but by this time, I couldn't have cared less about what happened to him. In retrospect, Randy the Ram ended up in worse shape than he was in when the movie started. Utterly depressing and a complete waste of time.

Review: The Wrestler

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