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
