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MOVIE:
The Wrestler
OUR RATING:
4/5 Stars
WHAT IT'S ABOUT:
Randy "The Ram" Robinson (Mickey Rourke) is a professional wrestler with his golden years long behind him. He barely gets by moonlighting on the independent wrestling circuit and working as a supermarket clerk during the day. As his body struggles to keep up with the physical demands of the game, he tries to reconnect with his estranged daughter Stephanie (Evan Rachel Wood) and start a new life with his favourite stripper, Cassidy (Marisa Tomei).
WHAT WE THOUGHT:
If it’s a lonely road to the top, it’s even lonelier on the way back down.
Darren Aronofsky’s film is an emotionally desolate place. Mickey Rourke is at its centre, and as the ageing Randy "The Ram" Robinson, a has-been wrestler, he completes his own glorious comeback to the acting limelight.
While it is interesting to put Rourke: the actor, and Robinson: the wrestler, side by side to compare their decline (Rourke quit acting for boxing in the 90s after a pile-up of personal troubles), The Wrestler has enough to commend it as a stand-alone story.
We meet Robinson at the twilight of his career. After a horrific stunt in the ring (in which his body is repeatedly punctured by a staple gun), he suffers a heart attack and is told by his doctor never to wrestle again. With a crummy day job and a rickety old trailer left to him, he finds life without wrestling incredibly hard.
Maybe because he’s been a fighter, maybe because he’s been down and out in his career, Rourke finds wells and wells of gravitas and loneliness to draw on for his role. It’s not as easy as it seems to play a simple man, at least not in an interesting way. But Randy Robinson fumbles believably, painfully, through 'ordinary' life as the simplicity of wrestling deserts him.
Marisa Tomei is alluring as his pal, a stripper by the stage name of Cassidy. While perhaps a little lightweight for an Oscar nom, her performance is an important one as Randy’s only real sympathiser and helps us to understand him better.
The Wrestler asks tough questions of when, if ever, that one thing that gives meaning to a person’s life should be given up. It is sobering as a story, but even more so as a meditation on one of our greatest fears: life without options.
WATCH THE TRAILER HERE:
