Sometimes it seems as though everything a film has riding on it comes down to the leading performance. How easily a great performance can elevate a medicore film, or how a misgudied one can stall an otherwise stellar film. The leading performance is so important in fact that it has the power to overshadow the entire film.
Mickey Rourke
That could have easily happened with Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, which, at its centre, has a powerful, moving, haunting, painful performance from Mickey Rourke whose career, not a decade ago, was assumed dead and buried.
The truth is, Mickey Rourke is a truly strange man. His exploits are infamous, he sometimes looks as though he dressed himself with his eyes closed, always looks like he’s just come from a barroom brawl and once even appeared in a photo with the filtered tip of his cigarette sticking out of his mouth.
So it’s strange that Rourke is such a good actor. His performance in The Wrestler is so full of nuance, longing, hurt, and remorse that it probably only could have been given by a man who has scraped the very lowest depths of failure and risen back up from it, renewed and ready to take back what was his. But maybe that’s the entire point of The Wrestler.
Central Theme
Annie Leibovitz once said that all stand-up comedians are really just manic depressives, and Peter Sellers used to say that off screen he had absolutely no personality, although anyone who has seen and believes The Life and Death of Peter Sellers knows this isn’t true: he was a cruel tyrant.
So, It might be true that all great entertainers come from a place of deep inner hurt and struggle, because no one really appreciates them, just the roles they play or the jokes they tell. Entertainers are the only people on the planet who get more love and recognition for who they aren’t than who they actually are. With that said, it seems, like Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino, The Wrestler houses what may be Mickey Rourke’s most personal, autobiographical role to date.
The Story
Now that that’s out of the way, it can be said that The Wrestler is a masterpiece in spite of Rourke and is only made better because of him. It’s the story of once great professional wrestler Randy “The Ram” Robinson. Randy works a dead-end job at a local grocery store, is addicted to painkillers, barely has enough money to pay the rent on his trailer, has a teenage daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) that wants nothing to do with him and his only friend is the stripper Cassidy (Marisa Tomei) who can’t quite bring herself to see him as anything more than a customer.
A Masterpiece
The brilliance of the film is that Aronofsky (coming back in a big way off the failure of The Fountain) doesn’t let the audience know just how they should feel about Randy. Outside the ring he’s a pathetic guy who can barely function on his own. When he decides to buy his estranged daughter a gift of reconciliation, he picks a hideous green sport jacket with an S on it because her name is Stephanie.
However, when Randy is in the ring, inflicting horrible pain on himself out of dedication to his art, he is king. He demands respect, the crowd, however small, loves him, and all the young guys look up to him as a legend.
So when Randy suffers a heart attack and is ordered into retirement he is lost. He realizes that he needs to get his life together, but is so bruised and beaten, so incapable of knowing how to go about this, that even the film’s most inspirational moments sting with the inevitable reality that Randy is a tragic figure, destined to screw up anything good to come his way.
Then the film poses the most tragic of questions: is it better for Randy to live his own empty, meaningless life that is always destined to fail, or to die, in the ring, a champion, doing the only thing he knows how to? It’s a loss either way. The genius of Rourke’s performance is that the audience cares about Randy in spite of all this.
Vetdict
The film, like all of Aronofsky’s previous work is a tragedy about a man searching for something that is completely outside of his human grasp. It’s a sad film about a sad, pathetic man who hides behind a fake moniker and a useless legacy that has gotten him nothing except one step closer to death.
Both Rourke and Aronofsky work together to bring this reality home with a cold, hard, often times, violent truth. Having both tasted failure and lived with it, both men lay themselves absolutely bare, refusing to fall into uninspired plot twists, to sugarcoat this material or provide easy answers, and because of it they have turned in one of the saddest, most honest, heartbreaking films since Leaving Las Vegas. This is one of the year’s best films.
Rating: 5 out of 5
See Mikey Rourke and his fellow nominees at this year's 81st Annual Oscar cermiony
