[Edits done 10/2/12 early p.m., and 10/5/12.]
I had wanted to re-view director Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan (2010), yet again. But I also wanted to see The Wrestler this year; I had seen it a few times before, I think in the theater when it came out, and I definitely did on DVD.
I had wanted to re-view director Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan (2010), yet again. But I also wanted to see The Wrestler this year; I had seen it a few times before, I think in the theater when it came out, and I definitely did on DVD.
The way I described this film in February, in my review of Black Swan, was based on memory and went this way (with a few changes made): “The Wrestler (2008) is a cinema verité type of affair following an over-the-hill professional wrestler who makes the rounds on the lower-tier, 'chitlins-circuit' level—whatever you want to call it—in which boxers, apparently has-beens and/or less capable, ply their trade to avid fans in small venues, the whole scene being on the tawdry side, almost like cockfighting. The situation is made worse by the wrestling—which is seen as ludicrous even in cleaner venues—apparently being more apt to be violent and degrading on the lower level. Mickey Rourke, looking like a refugee from such a world already, plays Randy Robinson…. (Evan Rachel Wood plays his estranged daughter, with whom he has a brief rapprochement.) Long story short: famous for his move the 'Ram Jam,' with which he jumps off the ropes onto his opponent for one final crushing blow, Randy, who has a heart attack about midway through the movie, maintains his dedication to his art so far that, in his final self-launch into one more Ram Jam, we fear he is going to have a heart attack that will kill him.”
To this you can add the following plot element: “For the last two-thirds or so of the story, Randy aims toward a kind of comeback in the form of a rematch with a wrestler he vied with (at Madison Square Garden) in the 1980s, which is scheduled in a future that is foreclosed career-wise after he has had a heart attack; after interpersonal/family-oriented setbacks, he yet decides to return to wrestling, and keeps the rematch date.”
I think it was easy to remember what I did of the plot in February because the overall story is not terribly complex or original, and would not be either to newcomers who hear a thumbnail sketch, or to someone like me viewing it again. It may seem to those who haven’t seen it as if it would come across like a fairly ordinary sports story, but what really clinches interest in this film—which won a lot of praise in 2008, and yet seems to me strangely “from a different time” now—is how well it achieves its story under an obviously tiny budget; what a grueling, John Steinbeckian type of life for Randy it depicts; and most notoriously, how actor Mickey Rourke fleshes out the role in large part because he looks like the physically ravaged, debauched-seeming, coarse-voiced old wrestler he portrays.
The movie manages to be affecting despite the tawdriness of much of what it depicts; what it lacks in a sort of moral complexity or refinement it makes up for in a direct emotional impact, part of which derives from the spectacle of Rourke, ravaged, jaded, and coarse, as he so much echoes the quality of Randy. The film is, from a critical level, at risk of being exploitative, almost as voyeuristic as the fans of this kind of (often sadistic-looking) wrestling seem to be, and sensationalistic; but what gives it moral weight is the theme of Rourke’s character’s dignity, such as shown in Rourke’s way of talking that manages to be elegant despite being tired and worn—as in someone who seems older than he really is, but doesn’t lack for a certain stamina to keep going in all he has in life: what seems as if it would be undignified for an aging man, an almost head-injured-juvenile type of sport.
As is explained in the making-of doc, the reason for this level of wrestling and its fans is that this “independent” level of “pro wrestlers” seems to be there, if not to be a “farm team” setup for up-and-comers, to provide a venue for experienced wrestlers many of whom are over the hill but, because they are close to broke and have no savings or the like, keep wrestling for the money and because they still have their fans.
Rourke, as is well enough known, is an almost freak-show feature, with results of weird plastic surgery (as I heard he had), results of apparent hard living including drug use (?)…. He has been known to have a close following in France (and elsewhere?), and has been remarked on as having been promising years ago (I remember him being in Diner [1982], in which he looks young and healthy if you see clips from it today, but I don’t remember much about his performance, not having seen it in many years). It’s hard to say what his “deal” is in terms of a bill of his specific health issues today, but he looks and sounds the part, and gives this film an almost wince-making quality in showing just how low a striving showman can go to remain true to his “trade”—in this case, a form of wrestling that seems to feed a public need for crass entertainment as well as ends up representing self-degradation (including with horrific physical ravages like rough encounters with broken glass, barbed wire, and even a staple gun), far from being anything resembling competitive athleticism.
Both Rourke and his character Randy, in their punished, earthy way, seem to perform the big risk—and receive the “grace”—that was commented on regarding a different piece of art by a review of the John Lennon album John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (1970): “In the words of a review of the time, he placed his balls defiantly on the line; out of sheer respect, the train ground to a halt” (Roy Carr and Tony Tyler, The Beatles: An Illustrated Record [New York: Harmony Books, 1978], p. 93).
I had forgotten that Rourke had actually been a boxer a couple times, which is mentioned in his Wikipedia bio.
I think I last saw this film in 2010, or 2009 at the earliest. Very recently, while I appreciated being able to check out corners of it better than before, I found it punishing enough that I didn’t want to see it more than once, though the “making-of” doc was worth two looks.
The Wrestler is a blue-collar half of a diptych, with rather trying features
When I reviewed Black Swan last winter, I remembered The Wrestler as in some sense the more genuine movie. I would still say this today. They apparently comprise a duo in Aronofsky’s mind, and it’s easy to see why: they both feature, at far-apart points on the American socioeconomic scale, a lone “artist” so dedicated to a physically grueling athletic endeavor (which has some art to it) that he or she endures physical ravages, enough to make us ask is his or her art worth this? With Nina, the upscale ballerina in Black Swan, we had an elaborate tale of a woman going partly mad as she tries to excel; but in The Wrestler, we can see (in comparing the two films) a world that seems so perverse—on the parts of the fans as well as of the athletes—that we wonder how this can really be dignified…, etc. (as I said above).
The reason Aronofsky didn’t make a film on the more famous big-name and big-venue (and cleaner) type of professional wrestling, which is silly enough but less violent than this bush-league stuff, is because it was out of the reach of Aronofsky’s budget because of licensing and control issues, according to the DVD. It doesn’t seem as if the movie really distorts the reality of the bush-league stuff much; some of the violent stuff seems to be there in real life. Some of the ways the competitors subject each other to torture is play-acting, but some of it uses actual means of cutting open chests, arms, etc. One match between the fictional Randy and a tall real-life wrestler with the real-life stage name “Necro Butcher” is painful to watch—featuring a body smashing through broken glass, a fall off a ladder onto a contraption topped with barbed wire…and the staple-gun I mentioned takes the cake, for me (with CGI staples used, at least in part; the DVD shows the low-tech but effective way CGI was used here).
If you accept, as the background, this mayhem and perversity as the world held dear by the sportsmen, their managers, and the yelling fans, then you can appreciate the story of Randy Robinson, stage name (or simply new name) of former Robin Ramzinsky (a name that embarrasses Randy, as when a pharmacy worker calls to him with it). Randy, in the tanning-parlor–baked pork-roll form of Rourke, sticks with this sport even into rather decrepit middle age (he can’t be more than about 50) because it is all he has for a career. His glory days, when he was young, were in the 1980s, with music of that time filtered into the film (in such hair bands as Ratt and the Scorpions); this music appears both as part of the decoration for the matches to herald Randy’s entrance and as popping up in a bar for Randy to dance to nostalgically, or pumped from his vehicle cassette player for drive-time pleasure.
A heart attack brings Randy to a greater sense of reality
After his match with the Necro Butcher, Randy has a heart attack, shown with a vomiting moment amid the film’s general approach of having the camera follow the hero as he walks his way through his life (which Aronofsky calls “proactive documentary style,” in which the camera operator knows generally where the actor is going or what he is going to do, but is sometimes surprised a bit); this same style is used with the delicate Nina in Black Swan.
Randy in the hospital is a bit of a quieted bull is a place that is not home to him at all, and when he leaves, he sets out on making some repairs in his life. He has been told by his surgeon he has to stop wrestling, advice he doesn’t welcome. He confides the news of his heart attack to a sort of friend (a female pole dancer/lap dancer with stage name Cassidy and real name Pam, played by Marisa Tomei). She takes the news in solemn confidence and a show of support. Cassidy is not only a local “working girl” of sorts whose paid services Randy uses (a sort of thing not uncommon among these wrestlers in the “independent” realm, per the DVD), but she is a sort of friend whom he tries to cultivate into a girlfriend.
Tomei has done a range of things over the years. Seeming a nice, fluid-expressions Italian American woman, now of middle age, she has the smarts to give interesting structure even to a surface-deceiving character like Mona Lisa in My Cousin Vinny (1992), in which she plays, with Joe Pesci, half a couple who are “fish out of water” when they, colorful city-area Italians (from Brooklyn)—relatively smart versions of the Jersey Shore type—go to the Deep South to help a relative get out of a bad legal fix (being arrested for murder). Tomei—complete with flashy clothes that would have some people make the conclusion-jumping remark, “There goes a guinea”—is humorous with the heavy city-area accent she affects, which masks how, despite the seeming limited mentality, she actually is an ace mechanic who becomes a key witness in the relative’s murder trial. She also—in a touch of absurdism—has the smarts to read the state’s huge tome of court rules and can lecture her boyfriend, Vinny (a novice attorney—for whom “six times [was] a charm” in terms of passing the bar), on one aspect of discovery rules. Tomei won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for this role.
By the way, it seems both Tomei and Rourke received Academy Award nominations for their roles in The Wrestler. Rourke also received a BAFTA award an a Golden Globe award for his work here, according to his Wikipedia bio.
Evan Rachel Wood adds a vivid portrait of a young daughter’s bitterness
Randy also seeks out his estranged daughter, Stephanie, who lives in a pretty humdrum-looking New Jersey suburb, with a Black female housemate with whom she appears to (at least in Randy’s view) have a lesbian relationship. She also attends school. Stephanie is played by Evan Rachel Wood, and father and daughter have a few potent scenes in the film, including when Randy has taken Stephanie to a boardwalk location and they talk in reconciling fashion and check out (and dance in) an under-reconstruction old shore building.
Randy says to Stephanie, while both are teary-eyed, summing both Randy and in a surface sense Rourke himself: “I’m a broken down piece of meat, and I’m alone, and I deserve to be alone. I just don’t want you to hate me.”
When Randy has first approached Stephanie, she reproaches Randy, who is apparently a classic absentee father to her. After they kindle a rapprochement, with Randy having appealed to her with his news of a heart attack, it seems like fences are being mended for the long term. After they set a date for doing something on a Saturday, Randy misses it because of a night of debauchery, and when he wakes up in a strange house the next day and “Oh shit!” hurries out to go to Stephanie, she is a storm of expression of upset at his being his same old way.
Wood, born in 1987, has been lauded as one of the best actresses of her generation, and yet it seems to me that the golden phase—or at least publicly fully obvious phase—of her noted career has run from about 2003 through 2009 or so (I would like to say otherwise). She is excellent here—when she rails at Randy in the first and last of their three encounters, Wood shows she can give off a lightning bolt of sadness-related, bitterness-related, and/or disillusionment-related emotion, which is both seen in a burst of “emoting” and in spelling it out with an extended stretch of words. This performance—though brief—and her full-spectrum performance in Thirteen (2003) are the high-water marks of her doing this sort of “negative emotion” thunderstorm. With a girl-next-door face—which somehow often seems inert or “quiet” in still photos—she can best be appreciated in action, her expression residing in a dynamic display. In this regard she is similar to today’s hero Jennifer Lawrence, who is more beautiful but, when not moving, has a sort of china-doll appearance, which also belies an emotional power that can come from beneath that. Maybe Lawrence is more meant for this post–financial-meltdown time, where fantasy stories reign supreme, because she is more of a country girl whose prodigious acting ability coheres with an image as a spirited (and sometimes hot-tempered) Girl Scout, which maybe her fans are looking for; Wood, who is more of a firebreather in terms of expressing the results of hard life (but not bad faith), maybe is “too negative” for today’s young fans; who knows.
But Wood has a wide range too; she played a positive enough daughter in the quirky The King of California (2007), and was a star in the Beatles-music celebration Across the Universe (2007, with florid visual style wrought by director Julie Taymor, and which even to me as a discriminating Beatles fan was mostly pretty good, and even featured Wood singing sometimes--a talent I usually don’t look for in a noted actress). She also passed muster with Woody Allen in order to feature, as a Southern ditz, in his comedy Whatever Works (2009). She has also appeared, with good notices, in a recent TV version of Mildred Pierce (~2011). In short, Wood is a solid, capacious talent, though maybe not to everyone’s taste; in any event, life being what it is, today she seems overshadowed in public notice by the younger actresses with personality-cult followings under the Twilight and Hunger Games tents (though maybe that isn’t so bad for Wood; our overexposure to the others may start exposing, or unfortunately causing, their latent flaws).
Wood’s appearance in The Wrestler is overall rather brief, serving the story; and her emotional pyrotechnics when she last deals with Randy—for me, taking her in was like watching someone with an extended spell of the dry heaves: you have an odd mix of beholding with awe and feeling sorry for, or touched by, the person—is an integral part of a sad story about a man whom we would almost consider a bumbling perpetual loser if he wasn’t a sort of striving artist dedicated to his sordid sport.
Frustration with Cassidy/Pam leaves Randy bereft
Randy is more asinine, in a sense, with Cassidy, the stripper played with both a seasoned woman’s savvy and a more genuine “on personal time” woman’s heart (yes, she is a sort of cliché, a variation on “the hooker with the heart of gold”). After having had his heart attack, he seems ripe to kindle a relationship with her, but she herself doesn’t really need this. For one thing, she is planning to move out of the area and leave her job. She has a child, and a better school awaits in her new town. (Later, she apologizes to him for her shove-off after she has revealed this situation and there is follow-up to it from an importunate Randy.)
It’s been critically pointed out (not least by, I think, Aronofsky on the DVD) that Cassidy/Pam is a little healthier than Randy because she has a solid separation between her sordid career and her personal life (and has prospects in her child). Randy, by contrast, has no “wall” between career and personal life because he has very little personal life. He lives in a tacky trailer for which he has trouble paying the rent, and it seems all he can do to keep up with the needs of his aging body, with ice packs, hearing aid, drugs like steroids, and so on.
I’ve left out some details, with good reason: the movie—if it interests you from what you’ve read here or heard—has to be seen to be, in some sense, believed, and it can be hard to take, depending on your sense of current “resiliency.” You start to feel as if you would prefer the upscale comforts of Nina’s world in Black Swan, except then you recall that Nina is having a florid psychological breakdown, whereas Randy is more physically apt to break down, including with a threat of another heart attack.
My hat is off to him, but still my jury is out with Aronofsky
I respect Aronofsky’s work without being in love with it. I think he does a careful job in terms of fitting in the details of his heroes’ worlds to show both their personal styles and their shaping environments, and the camera-following style heightens a sense of “existential tension” that underscores how these striving people are in what they take their daily steps, come hell or high water, to do. But the movies can also be considered manipulative, or at least pretty provocative, and I wonder about the emotional depth, the real wisdom, behind these characters—there’s something a little pulp-ish about their mentalities, about what they as characters are meant to say about us.
While I’m glad I’ve seen The Wrestler a few times, once was enough for me this go-around. But please, if you are interested in Black Swan, you should check out The Wrestler too, because (in some sense) it is the more genuine film.
