Demob Happy

Film Review: The Wrestler - Darren Aronofsky

8/10

My irrational levels of excitement concerning Darren Aronofsky’s ‘The Wrestler’ were not due to the hype concerning Mickey Rourke’s latest comeback, but rather from a misguided obsession with American wrestling from my adolescence. Not just the glossier WWF (now WWE) end, but the dingier minor leagues that featured the type of bloody barbed wire “death matches” in which the likes of Cactus Jack and Terry Gordy first plied their trade. I was particularly partial to the USWA, a Tennesee-based Southern US rival to the prime-time product served up by the likes of Vince McMahon. I remember watching good ‘ol boys duking in out a darkened theatre for the keys to a brand new pick up truck, all highly anomalous stuff for a London teenager.

The publicists will tell you that The Wrestler is in fact The Mickey Rourke story, and yes, while the part was apparently written for Rourke, I didn’t enter the cinema to watch a biopic. There was an interesting story to be told about the kind of men occupying the lower end of the American wrestling spectrum, and Darren Aronofsky has told it with an unpatronising, unflinching and authentic eye. Although arguably there could have been no other man to play the main role, there is more to this film than Mickey Rourke: the great unsung performance of the film is that of Marissa Tomei, who plays an ageing stripper just as convincingly. There is an interesting parallel between the two roles and the actors that inhabit them, but one can’t help feel equal amounts of pathos for a former Oscar-winning actress who seems to spend so much of her time on screen now unclothed (the last time I saw here was in Sydney Lumet’s disappointing comeback ‘When the Devil Knows Your Dead‘). Playing a stripper is a bold statement to an industry that treats actresses of her age with such distain. Mickey Rourke’s legend as a Hollywood bad boy fuck up has been immortalised, no matter the pain inflicted on himself, and no doubt his career still has legs; Marisa Tomei certainly has legs, but what is left of her career? Like a stripper of a certain age, she is surely entering a less certain period in her professional life, a fact for which Hollywood must partly take the blame.

A visceral but naturalistic piece of filmmaking, The Wrestler is shot in washed out hues where the only the only colour with any clarity is blood. Sometimes pitying, but not condescending, Darren Aronofsky’s film is a touch too conventional to be considered, say, the wrestling ‘Raging Bull’. The Wrestler is a moving piece but arguably what you see is what you get, there is probably not a lot to be gained from repeated viewings. The plot is fairly four-square, linear stuff, and there’s a slightly contrived subplot concerning Randy’s daughter in which he messes up so stupidly it is hard to be entirely sympathetic. However, the warts-and-all dinginess, unflinching close-ups and medium shots and documentary-style hand-helds make a fitting contrast to the stagey, spotlit spectacle of wrestling entertainment. For a film to go behind the fakery and smoke and mirrors of professional wrestling, or even stripping, it was paramount that we can believe in Randy ‘The Ram’ and Cassidy the stripper. And we do, but they perform with such understated, unshowy naturalism that we are not bullied into marvelling at their performances.