ScreenWize

Great art is sometimes difficult viewing, and such is Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, a film that will be remembered as Mickey Rourke’s greatest screen triumph as he suffers his way physically and emotionally through a simple story of persistence. Rourke is Randy “The Ram” Robinson – an ageing wrestler who was top of his game twenty years ago, and who is left at the end of a punishing career with no more than a rented trailer, a photo of a long lost daughter, and barely enough cash to buy at lap dance at the local girly bar.

It’s there he befriends stripper Pam (Marisa Tomei) who is questioning how much longer she can go on grinding out a living with the nightly pole dance. It’s also she who suggests to Randy that he try making up with his daughter Stephanie (Evan Rachel Wood), and who provides us with a clue about Aronofsky’s higher aims when she compares Randy to Christ and jokes about “The Sacrificial Ram”. Randy – a sociable soul and scared of growing old – tries hard to be something other than the legend he once was in the ring – father, lover, supermarket employee – but is drawn back to the gritty pain he must endure in the ring and the cries from the crowd that go with it.

Aronofsky films the story as documentary and keeps us body-huggingly close to the battered Randy in an intense hand-held relationship, and it’s here that Rourke’s extraordinary performance is evident – he inhabits Randy so totally that it will be difficult to see him as anything else for years to come. Rourke – who abandoned his movie career many years ago to make a return to the boxing ring – is long-haired, meat-faced, muscle-bound – but ultimately plays Randy as a sensitive individual, racked with the most human of concerns: how to stay connected.

Much of the film is taken up with the punishing details of life in the ring – the opening sequence sees Randy at his work on a typical weekend, whilst the film’s most demanding visual experience sees Randy in bloody hand to hand combat in an extreme wrestling bout with The Necro Butcher (Dylan Summers) where staple guns, barbed wire and glass are tools of the trade.

Whilst the film belongs to Rourke, Tomei’s strong performance as the troubled stripper is a critical balancing force in the otherwise harrowing story. Wood has less chance to shine with a screenplay by Robert Siegel that leaves some questions about her rapidly changing relationship with her father. But it’s a minor quibble in a relentlessly visceral and very moving piece of art.

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Filed Under: Reviews by Simon