Daily Archives: Friday, August 7, 2015

  • The Wrestler

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Darren Aronofsky (2008)

    The Wrestler is ostensibly about a sporting has-been’s against-the-odds comeback; the screenplay (by Robert Siegel) is formulaic.  It’s really about Mickey Rourke, who plays the wrestler, Randy ‘the Ram’ Robinson – and the convergence between Randy’s and Rourke’s biographies is a main factor in the film’s success.  Rourke was a very promising boxer before he turned to acting in the mid-1970s; disenchanted with movies, he temporarily resumed boxing 20 years later.  He (now) looks like a pugilist – and one who has been on the receiving end of his profession for a long time.  Rourke put on weight for this role and watching him is both similar to and different from watching De Niro in Raging Bull.   The similarity is feeling that it’s the actor, at least as much as the character, who’s the hero – because of what he’s prepared to put himself through.   The difference is that, although the extra pounds made De Niro ‘disappear’ into his role almost literally, you never felt that he and Jake La Motta were an indivisible entity.  Randy the Ram and Mickey Rourke – who wrecked his film career first time around, whose good looks have been damaged by his fighting history and/or substance abuse and/or plastic surgery – are of one substance.  (From my point of view, this difference is reinforced by the fact that – as I realised shortly before going to The Wrestler – I’d seen Rourke in only two other films:  Diner, from 1982, and (a small part in) The Pledge.  By the time of Raging Bull, De Niro had made an indelible impression in half a dozen, very different roles.)  With the attention, praise and awards that are coming his way, it might seem a remote possibility that Rourke’s work in The Wrestler will be underrated yet I think there is a risk of our not noticing the skill of his acting – because the film is about Rourke’s comeback as much as Randy’s, because Rourke is thought to ‘be’ the man he’s playing, and because the performance seems to be so genuinely felt and is so purely executed.   The script’s conception of the wrestler as a decent man trying to retain self-respect is unoriginal, to say the least; but there’s a dignity and a benignity about Randy (in the way he talks with other men at the gym and the local kids, as well as with the two women in his life) that seems to come from deep inside the actor – and which transforms the uninspired idea of the character.

    The story, set in New Jersey, is very basic and has no subplots.  Randy is twenty years past his peak, still scratching around for a living in the lower depths of the wrestling circuit, and not quite managing it.  He has to work part-time, loading boxes at a supermarket to supplement his increasingly meagre appearance fees.   He lives in a trailer.   (I liked the way that the local kids regarded him with a mixture of awe and contempt – in recognition of his prowess as a fighting man and the reduced circumstances he’s living in.)  There’s talk of a rematch to mark the twentieth anniversary of the highlight of Randy’s career, a sellout bout with ‘the Ayatollah’ (Ernest Miller) at Madison Square Garden but, after an especially brutal match (in which he and his opponent use – inter alia – staple guns, glass and barbed wire on each other), Randy has a heart attack in the locker room.  His wrestling days seem to be over.  He tries to develop his relationship with a lap dancer – stage name Cassidy, real name Pam – and with Stephanie, the teenage daughter from whom he’s estranged (I wasn’t clear what had happened to the girl’s mother).  He gets some extra hours working on the deli counter at the supermarket but he can’t stand it, or make headway with Cassidy.  After getting closer to Stephanie, he fails to turn up for a dinner they’ve arranged and is rejected by her again.   Randy goes back into training and his rematch with the Ayatollah is the climax of the film.   Randy’s heart gives out and the screen cuts to black.  The picture ends the moment Randy ends.

    Darren Aronofsky applies himself to the material in a way that is best described as full blooded.  He makes strenuous efforts to turn this into an existential fable:  Randy is a wrestler through and through – that’s all he can be and, deprived of his raison d’être, he can find nothing to live for.   (A Bruce Springsteen song about a ‘one trick pony’ plays over the closing credits.)   To make the point, Aronofsky uses the boxing picture convention of shooting the fighter from behind as he makes his way from the dressing room, through the crowd, towards the ring.   He does this at the start to show the grotty world in which Randy is now working (we see the wrestler’s trademark blond mane long before his face).  Aronofsky overdoes it in repeating the camerawork – and putting ironic crowd noises on the soundtrack – to follow Randy’s bathetic progress from out of the bowels of the supermarket to his deli counter station.  Randy’s deliberately cutting his hand in the meat slicer as he quits his job at the supermarket seems one gory moment too many;  yet Aronofsky’s strongarm tactics are mostly very effective.  However much you resent and recoil from the thudding violence of the wrestling matches, he gives the sequences in the ring an accumulating rhythm and manages to make the fleshly bulk on display seem both animate and inanimate, both repellent and hypnotic.  (If some of the bodies are golden it’s because they appear to be well advanced in the process of being cooked.)  And the theme of self-harm is so central to Aronofsky’s treatment that the staple guns, the glass and the barbed wire do make dismaying sense.

    Aronofsky may have felt the script was no more than a framework for the approach he wanted to take and the performance he felt he could get from Rourke.  But the screenplay is so mechanical that it weakens the film in important ways – especially in the story of Randy’s relationship with Stephanie.  You feel their relationship fails because the formula demands it (the series of scenes with Stephanie amount to something like the required elements in a gymnastics or skating programme) rather than because of the natures of the two people concerned, or even the nature of the world in which they live.  On an outing to an abandoned waterfront, Stephanie thaws and Randy starts saying how he really feels about her and himself.   The emotional changes are false and the dialogue is bad – and touchingly though Mickey Rourke plays the scene, this was one point where I didn’t believe him.  Evan Rachel Wood’s performance almost inevitably reflects the unconvincing, mechanical shifts in Stephanie’s feelings and behaviour.

    The relationship between Randy and Cassidy/Pam is much more successful.  Marisa Tomei (who is forty-four) looks in such great shape that she transcends the cliché of the aging stripper role; it’s when Cassidy comes off stage that she becomes someone older – because of her ambivalence about what she does and about Randy.   She’s drawn to him but she knows him through her work and she wants to keep her work separate from her day job as a single mother, doing the best she can for her son.   When she agrees to help Randy choose some clothes as a present for Stephanie and they meet for the first time away from the club where Cassidy works, he’s amazed by her appearance.   When he says that she looks so ‘clean’, Tomei beautifully expresses and represses Pam’s sense of shame about the work she does to pay her bills and uncertainty about a man from the club world getting into her life on the outside.   (The contrast between this woman’s two lives and Randy’s born-to-fight simplicity is perhaps the one potentially complex element in the script.)  The wrapping up of the character – she walks out on her job, travels to the rematch, but leaves when she can’t stand to watch what’s happening to Randy in the ring – is ludicrously predictable and perfunctory but it hardly matters;  by that point, Tomei, like Rourke, has created her own truth.

    In Britain anyway, wrestling has always been the nearly comedic cousin of boxing.  Since both leave me cold (wrestling especially so – because of its cachet as an unserious entertainment as much as a matter-of-life-and-death sport), I’m not sure whether the primal feelings that are often invoked to explain people’s fascination with boxing are supposed to be part of wrestling’s appeal too.  (My lack of the human equipment needed to enjoy fighting makes me a bad audience for The Wrestler:  when Randy gets work on the deli counter, I felt not his humiliation but relief that he’d got a relatively safe job in a shop, then pleasure that he seemed good at the job and had a great rapport with the customers – these encounters are really enjoyable.)   Yet this silly sport, with its cartoon participants and style of performance, and a crude script – it’s typical that Randy doesn’t have just a heart attack but bypass surgery, as if anything less might make it arguable that he should continue with fighting – deliver, thanks to Rourke, a genuinely powerful body-and-soul melodrama.   I’m struck by the fact that, for all the visceral immediacy of the piece, it seems stronger to me a week after viewing.

    11 January 2009

     

  • The Turning Point

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Herbert Ross (1977)

    Plenty of Hollywood (melo)dramas pivot on the idea of a single, crucial event in the past that determined the future direction of a character’s life.  This film, from a screenplay by Arthur Laurents, is unusually explicit by announcing the mechanism in its title – surprisingly explicit when the mechanism is such a cliché.   Also unusual is that, as far as I could tell from the credits and can see from the Wikipedia and IMDb entries for The Turning Point, there’s no acknowledgement of the film’s debt to the John van Druten stage play and subsequent movie Old Acquaintance (1943).  In the latter, Kit Marlowe (Bette Davis) is a writer whose professional success stirs up the resentment of Millie Drake (Miriam Hopkins), Kit’s best friend since girlhood;  some years later, the closeness between the childless Kit and Millie’s daughter becomes another bone of contention.  The daughter’s name is Deirdre; Kit’s pet name for her is ‘DeDe’.  There are loud echoes of both these things in The Turning Point and calling the grudge-bearing character Deedee is a heavy hint that she’s a scion of the Old Acquaintance clan.  Pauline Kael found the resemblance so strong that her review of  Herbert Ross’s film was called ‘Shouldn’t Old Acquaintance Be Forgot?’

    The literary context of the van Druten material is replaced here by the world of classical ballet.  Twenty years ago, Deedee (Shirley MacLaine) and Emma (Anne Bancroft) were competing for the lead in a new ballet of Anna Karenina; then came the turning point.  As DeeDee ruefully puts it to Emma, ‘I got pregnant and you got nineteen curtain calls’.  Deedee gave up a career in dance to marry Wayne (Tom Skerritt) and raise a family in Oklahoma City.  They now have three teenage children and run a local dance school.  Emma has been a première danseuse ever since she played Anna Karenina, although her long run at the top is approaching its end.   The film starts with the American Ballet Company (based on American Ballet Theatre), of which Emma’s a leading light, giving a performance in Oklahoma City.   Deedee’s elder daughter Emilia (Leslie Browne) is an aspiring dancer.  Emma, who’s her godmother, suggests that she join the company at their base in New York.  Deedee, Emilia and her younger brother Ethan, who’s also into ballet, travel there.  Emilia enjoys a meteoric rise to classical dance stardom, increasing the tensions between her mother and godmother to the point of a physical fight one night in a deserted Lincoln Center.   The two women’s slapping and hair-pulling, needless to say, are not only climactic but cathartic.  (The script’s construction is sometimes cavalier in its crudeness:  the tensions between Emma and Deedee, after being pointed up early on, are left in store until they’re needed for the big finish.)

    I saw The Turning Point around the time of its original release and remembered it as being more trashily enjoyable than I found it now.  Herbert Ross, whose career as a choreographer began with ABT before he moved to Broadway and Hollywood, directed; his wife, Nora Kaye, a famous ballerina, co-produced with Ross (and Laurents).  The film-makers’ love of ballet is reflected principally in two ways, somewhat conflicting but both tiresome.  First, the artistic milieu of the movie isn’t just treated reverently; the Rosses and Laurents seem to assume that it confers depth.  Second, the film attempts to present ballet as wholesomely American – more specifically, as a suitable occupation for male heterosexuals.  When Emilia goes to New York, she soon has an affair with Yuri, the company’s brilliant leading man.   Yuri is played by Mikhail Baryshnikov, in his screen acting debut; nearly everything Baryshnikov does is strong yet his presence illustrates the fundamental weaknesses of the movie.  For one thing, his masculinity – on stage and off – is enough in itself to dispose instantly of any idea that men who do ballet must be cissies – but, in order to ram the point home, the script makes Yuri an amiable, incorrigible tomcat.  All this renders the character of Deedee’s son Ethan (Phillip Sanders), who does baseball as well as ballet and talks and behaves like a jock, as otiose as it’s embarrassing.  In the second half of The Turning Point, Herbert Ross puts together excerpts featuring actual ABT artists, most notably Suzanne Farrell and Peter Martins, and the dancer-characters in the movie.   Ross rightly recognises Baryshnikov’s solo from Le Corsaire as a highlight:  the problem is that it’s so good it not only eclipses the preceding dances but just about obliterates the brittle story that Ross is telling.

    Baryshnikov acts easily, unlike Leslie Browne, who plays the doe-eyed Emilia.   Browne joined ABT in 1976 and became a principal ten years later.  As a dancer here, she’s pleasing but unexciting, although her graceful impersonality is an effective counterpoint to Baryshnikov’s dynamic flamboyance when she partners him in the pas de deux from Don Quixote (the John Curry music, as I think of it).  As a screen actress, though, Browne is inexpressive and awkward.  Emilia’s fortunes in love and dance occupy too much screen time anyway; with Browne in the role, these parts of the movie become merely boring.  There is plenty more bad acting in The Turning Point and not just from famous dancers like Antoinette Sibley.  Some of the proper actors – Martha Scott as the company manager, Daniel Levans as a ‘comically’ egocentric choreographer – aren’t that hot either.  As Emma, Anne Bancroft certainly looks the part – she’s spectacularly, ascetically skinny.   Her playing of the role has a prideful quality, though:  that connects with Emma’s attention-seeking quality – charisma on tap – but Bancroft’s performance lacks shadings and surprises.   The character of the anti-arty-farty middle daughter in Deedee’s family is as obviously drawn as that of the brother although the girl is rather better played, by Lisa Lucas.  As a grande dame of the ballet world, the elderly Alexandra Danilova has a vivid, rather appealing deliberateness.

    The best acting, even if that’s damning with faint praise, comes from Shirley MacLaine and Tom Skerritt.  Watching Deedee and Wayne together, you see how a marriage and a largely happy family life has continued over the years but you see too a persistent tension, born of Deedee’s guilty regret.   It’s not that her disappointment at giving up a dance career is rampant – more that she can’t prevent Wayne from knowing the ending of that career has never stopped mattering to her.  Tom Skerritt may be advantaged by the part of Wayne being underwritten but he gives a lovely, sensitive performance.  Shirley MacLaine doesn’t have that advantage, and her clothes and hairdo underline Deedee’s provincial deprivations too heavily, but she’s tenaciously truthful:  once Emma and Deedee have had their set-to, we’re supposed to believe they’ve got all the bad feelings out of their system; what’s believable are the slight suggestions in MacLaine that Deedee hasn’t.   There’s a particularly good scene between MacLaine and Skerritt when Deedee admits to Wayne what Emma’s accused her of – wanting to have Wayne’s child and to marry him to prove to herself that he wasn’t gay.   Wayne says quietly that he always knew that’s what she wanted, and that he needed to prove it to himself too.   This is one of the rare moments in The Turning Point when issues around the sexuality of male dancers are presented subtly.  I didn’t take what Wayne said here to mean that he’d been worried about having homosexual feelings – rather that the prevailing assumptions of the time inevitably caused him to wonder.   There’s one other, somewhat similar moment that registers convincingly – when Emilia comes home from a night with Yuri and tells her mother not to worry because she’s on the pill.  Shirley MacLaine’s face expresses Deedee’s hurt frustration that she didn’t have that option twenty years back.

    27 June 2012

     

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