The Wrestler (2008)

Official trailer

The Wrestler is Darren Aronofsky’s 2008 American sports drama. The film depicts aging professional wrestler Randy The Ram Robinson continuing to work small-venue independent matches twenty years after his peak fame.

After suffering a heart attack following a hardcore match, Randy attempts to reconnect with his estranged daughter Stephanie and pursues a relationship with stripper Pam who performs under the name Cassidy. He eventually returns to the ring for a rematch with his career rival despite medical advice that further wrestling will kill him. Mickey Rourke plays Randy.

Marisa Tomei plays Pam. Evan Rachel Wood plays Stephanie.

Ernest Miller plays Randy’s career rival The Ayatollah. Mark Margolis plays Lenny, the wrestling promoter. Robert Siegel wrote the screenplay. Wild Bunch and Protozoa Pictures produced the film on a budget of approximately 6 million dollars, and it grossed approximately 44 million dollars worldwide. The work won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

The Wrestler hurts to watch, and that’s exactly why I rate it this high. Rourke looks like he’s bleeding for real in front of the camera, and I spend the whole film wanting Randy to walk away from the ring while knowing he won’t.

The film is the principal modern professional wrestling drama and the film that established Mickey Rourke’s career rehabilitation after fifteen years of marginal Hollywood standing.

Rourke had been a major star in the 1980s through Diner (1982), Rumble Fish (1983), Body Heat (1981 supporting role), and 9 1/2 Weeks (1986) before personal difficulties and professional choices reduced his career to minor appearances. The Wrestler gave Rourke a role that explicitly engaged with his own faded-star circumstances. The performance won the Golden Globe and the BAFTA Best Actor awards.

He was nominated for the Academy Award and lost to Sean Penn for Milk. The combination of personal history and committed performance produced one of the great career comeback works in modern cinema. The film treats professional wrestling with real seriousness despite its surface kitsch.

The Rourke Comeback

Mickey Rourke had been a leading man in the 1980s before a combination of erratic professional choices, personal difficulties, and a brief boxing career that left him with significant facial damage reduced his Hollywood standing to minor supporting work. By 2007 he was approaching age fifty-five and had been largely written off by the industry. Aronofsky cast him in The Wrestler against considerable studio resistance. The studios wanted Nicolas Cage for the role and refused to support Rourke’s casting initially.

Aronofsky reportedly remortgaged his house to maintain the film with Rourke after the original financing collapsed. Rourke’s performance vindicated the director’s commitment to the casting. The completed work showed that the actor’s own personal damage gave him capacity for this role that conventional casting couldn’t have produced. Rourke’s face contains the history that the character requires. His voice carries the weariness that the role demands. The casting was essential to the film’s success.

I shudder to think what this would have been with Nicolas Cage. He’s fine in plenty of things, but only Rourke’s face could tell me about twenty years of bad decisions before he opens his mouth.

Professional Wrestling as Subject

The film treats professional wrestling with real seriousness despite the industry’s reputation as kitsch entertainment. The matches include extensive backstage cooperation between wrestlers planning their performances.

The film shows the choreography as collaborative artistic work instead of as sporting competition. It shows the physical damage as real even when the outcomes are predetermined. The combination of artistic performance and actual physical destruction produces particular tension that the film never resolves.

Real professional wrestlers played supporting roles in the film.

The hardcore match sequence where Randy is cut with staples and barbed wire was filmed with actual practice. The pain Randy experiences is real even though the outcome of the match is staged. The film treats the hardcore wrestling subculture with documentary accuracy and doesn’t condescend to its subjects. Wrestling fans who watched the film often commented on its uncondescending treatment of their interest. The fictional film became something like documentary for audiences with knowledge of the actual industry.

The staple and barbed wire match is the hardest stretch in the film for me to sit through, and I think it’s the smartest. The fight is fixed and the blood is real, and the film makes me respect these men without ever asking me to take the storyline seriously.

The Father-Daughter Failure

Randy attempts to reconnect with his daughter Stephanie throughout the film. He buys her presents she doesn’t want. He arranges an oceanside walk where they recover something of their lost relationship. Later he arranges a dinner that he then misses because he’s doing cocaine and having sex with a fan at a bar.

The pattern of brief connection followed by catastrophic failure repeats. Stephanie eventually tells Randy permanently that she doesn’t want to see him again.

Randy wants to repair the relationship and proves incapable of the discipline the repair would require. The performance refuses to soften that. He’s sympathetic without being capable, and the film is stronger for making him neither a villain nor a victim. The missed dinner is the scene that guts me. I wanted to reach into the screen and drag him out of that bar, and Stephanie’s final refusal feels completely earned.

Is The Wrestler as good as people say?

It’s a 9 because Rourke gives the performance of his career in a film that treats wrestlers, strippers and washed-up men with more respect than most dramas give anybody. The father-daughter scenes are brutal, the ring scenes are honest, and I believe every bruise.

What keeps it from a 10 for me is that Pam’s story feels thinner than Randy’s, and I wanted more of Tomei. Watch it if you care about sports films, about Rourke, or about movies that take their subjects seriously.

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