Review

Review Date: 18-January-09
Spoiler Rating: High
Juju Judgment: Juicy

The Wrestler (2008)

A friend in graduate school once noted that if our spectacularly messed-up professors had not found a place in academia they would have been confined to a mental institution. I remember this because it was both funny and true. There are some people and some callings that suggest an inexorable fate and some lives that seem devoid of options.

The Wrestler is the story of such a person, calling, and life, buffeted by the fact of age which limits everybody's options. It was a risky proposition for screenwriter Robert Siegel and director Darren Aronofsky. How do you engage an audience with a character who is good for just one thing? Especially if that one thing is ridiculous? For starters, you get an actor who might himself have been born for the role. Mickey Rourke slips into the spandex pants of The Wrestler with perfect ease. He is Randy "The Ram" Robinson (or so he has become, shedding his birth name like an unwanted skin), a professional wrestler who enjoyed a sparkling heyday in the 1980s. Twenty years later he is battered but still in the game, peddling his wares in two-bit weekend bouts and scraping up enough money for a mobile home and an arsenal of painkillers. He seems content with his lot. Whatever emptiness might taint his weeknights is dispelled by the adoration of his drunken fans and the camaraderie of his fellow charlatan athletes.

Aronofsky offers a good look at the spectacle to which Randy has given his life, and it is both ridiculous and grueling. Even if you know what your "opponent" is going to do because you choreographed it beforehand, that doesn't soften the chair smashed on your head or the knee slammed into your back (or the self-inflicted gash to produce dramatic blood). In one horrifying scene during which I had to avert my eyes (and noticed everyone else in my row doing the same), Randy learns how the public's appetite for violence has increased since he first hit the ropes. The experience proves more than his body can bear, and later, in the hospital, he receives what sounds like a death sentence: he cannot continue wrestling.

Randy gives the new ground rules a shot. Finding the loneliness of obscurity excruciating, he tries to forge a relationship with his estranged daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) and to court his favorite stripper (Marisa Tomei), with whom he has much in common. Like wrestlers, strippers sell fantasy with their bodies and are therefore much threatened by reality and time. Tomei's character is afraid to get too attached to Randy, probably with good reason. He is, as his daughter reminds him, an unreliable fuck-up. The only place where he has ever been successful or admired is in the ring. What choices does that leave him?

The Wrestler is not like Rocky where you cheer for the underdog or the middle-aged guy who takes one last stab at glory. It is more like Thelma and Louise where you feel an uncomfortable empathy for someone whose critical decision stems from a cornered, "what the hell?" reaction. The brutality and narrowness of Randy's world are not pleasant to witness. Yet there is a touching frailty in his clarity of purpose.

Copyright © 2009 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.