The Wrestler

Mickey Rourke plays Randy ‘The Ram’ Robinson, a former all-American wrestling icon. With his 80’s heyday far behind him, Randy continues to wrestle, swapping the bright lights of Madison Square Garden for the gym halls and civic centres of New Jersey. Not quite down and out, but certainly down, Randy struggles to get by even when combining his cut of the gate at his weekend wrestling shows and the salary from his part time job in a local grocery store. His spare time sees him frequent a local strip club, Cheeks, where he enjoys the company of stripper Cassidy (played by Marisa Tomei) with whom he hopes for more than a stripper / customer relationship. Ill health convinces Randy to try and reconcile with his estranged daughter Stephanie (played with conviction by Evan Rachel Wood) and eventually sees him give up the sport. Will a new life away from wrestling see Randy forge the relationships that he longs for or will the lure of the ring prove too strong?

Darren Aronofsky’s progression as a director has been a logical one. His first feature, Pi, made on a shoestring budget of $68,000, grabbed the attention of the indie scene, winning him the director’s prize at the 1998 Sundance film festival. Commercially too the film was a huge success taking upwards of 3,200,000 dollars domestically and 4,600,000 dollars worldwide at the box office. The film is in fact ranked 20th in the list of the most profitable movies (based on return in investment) of all time. His sophmore effort, Requiem for a Dream, produced on an estimated budget of $4,500,000 is now recognised as a cult classic; one of those films that if you’re serious about american independent cinema, you have to see. Accompanied by an Oscar nomination for Ellen Burstyn, the film announced Aronofsky to the mainstream audience as a true talent. His next outing, The Fountain, was to be his first ‘mainstream’ film, despite essentially being an art film with the star pull of Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. Having endured a tumultuous production period which saw him lose both of his high profile actors, Aronofsky eventually saw the release of his film in 2006 with Hugh Jackman and his partner Rachel Wiesz in the leading roles. The film bombed commercially, failing to recoup it’s budget of $35,000,000 during it’s theatrical run. Critically the film proved to be extraordinarily divisive; some hailing it as a masterpiece, others far from moved by it’s percieved pretentions.

Despite The Fountain’s failings, a clear progression exists in Aronofsky’s work nonetheless. From so-called ‘guerilla filmmaking’ on the most modest of budgets to major studio funding, Aronofsky has delivered extremely personal films, always finding an audience. Critically too, from Sundance to the Oscars, the still young director has made his mark for better or for worse. No one will be more aware of this progression than Aronofsky himself, who, despite having the drive and ability to churn out more that 3 films in his 11 years as a professional filmmaker, has always been sure to choose his projects carefully and involve himself in all aspects of production from scripting through to direction and beyond. Speculation about the director’s future in the industry was rife when reports of The Fountain’s troubled production began to circulate; is Darren Aronofsky mainstream material? was the question on everyone’s lips. 2009 sees Aronofsky’s resoundingly confident answer to this question in the shape of his fourth, and quite possibly best, feature film The Wrestler.

As different as Aronofsky’s first 3 features are from each other, The Wrestler is a breed apart from the director’s previous work. After the myriad complexity of The Fountain, even the most versed of cineastes would have had a hard time predicting Aronofsky’s next step; onwards and upwards as the director’s modus operandi seems to be. How does it get ‘bigger’ than an existential love story told through the technique of mirroring 3 separate storylines, each 500 years apart? Indeed, a prominent feature of Pi, Requiem and The Fountain was the director’s interest in combining multiple strands of narrative so as to tell more than one story at the same time. The Wrestler sees Aronofsky moving away from this trend alltogether, instead adopting a reductive approach to narrative that starkly isolates the film from it’s predecessors. The film is about one man, and perhaps a man who is incapable of leading the kind of life that would see him inspire three separate storylines. Some might argue that he isn’t even worthy of one and there is certainly nothing at all spectacular about Randy ‘The Ram’ Robinson. Knowing this better than anyone, Aronofsky crafts a visual style that perfectly emulates the character.

It is fair to say that we essentially follow Randy around for the duration of the film, both figuratively and literally. Our introduction to him is understated; a long handheld tracking shot as he leaves a gym hall after a wrestling match. It is perhaps 5 minutes before his face is fully revealed and in this time we see him signing autographs for loyal fans and returning to his trailer park home to find himself locked out. He sleeps in his van and in this moment his face is revealed, stricken with the pain of nostalgia as he stares at old newspaper clippings of his heyday as a professional wrestler. Aronofsky is clever to resist burdening his protagonist with any unecessary extravagance, the kind that may have resulted from opening his film with a wrestling match itself. Instead we get a collage of colourful media, the same kind that Randy collects and pins to the wall of his van. The juxtaposition between our introduction to The Wrestler and our introduction to the man himself is stark and it needs to be to establish the film’s key theme; the dichotomy between life inside and outside the ring for Randy.

It is this dichotomy that fuels the film and results in both the internal conflict for Randy and the external conflict between him, his love interest Cassidy and his estranged daughter Stephanie. With great affection for the entertainment form, Aronofsky presents the wrestling world, even in it’s delapidated form as depicted here, as a context rich in camerardarie and mutual respect. It is easy to see, nostalgia aside, why Randy is keen to recognise wrestling as his true calling and the ring as his true home. When he wrestles he is a somebody, if only to the 100 strong crowd and those who wrestle with him. Backstage scenes, including one that cuts between the action in the ring 15 minutes prior and the subsequent medical attention that Randy recieves (perhaps the film’s only really moment of directorial flare), are handled with genuine intent to show the entertainment form in its true nature. Jeers of ‘fake!’ should rightly be dispelled after just one viewing and whilst the film will hardly convert it’s viewers to professional wrestling fans, it does serve to craft an emotional and at times visceral tale out of a subject that many, or most, would think incapable of doing so.

The film sees Aronofsky not only adopting a new visual style, but also tackling what can be considered ‘action’ scenes for the first time in the shape of the wrestling matches themselves. Directing for the first time without cinematographer Matthew Libatique (who, having lensed last year’s Iron Man seems to have moved on to bigger and better things), Aronofsky puts Maryse Alberti through his paces in a number of up-close-and-personal match scenes that borrow from Scorsese’s now lauded ‘inside the ring’ shooting style. Like in Raging Bull, the result is an intimacy that places the viewer in the thick of the action. The Wrestler uses professional wrestling much in the same way that Raging Bull uses boxing; as a context rather than a subject. Both are films about individuals that happen to wrestle or box, and whereas Randy is defined first and foremost by his time in the ring, he still very much exists out of it. Nevertheless, without any ring-set scenes the film would fall flat – it is necessary for us to see Randy doing what he loves for us to understand him and if we fail to understand him he becomes nothing more than a ridiculous spandex clad wrestler to us.

Although the tone of The Wrestler is undoubtedly sombre, there exists in the film some moments of humour that serve to momentarily alleviate the gloom. Given the sincerity of the script these moments are priceless in their inclusion; none fall flat. A scene in which Randy attempts to coax a few extra hours out of his boss at the local grocery store in which he works sees him walk in on the short, balding man watching porn in his office. The resulting awkwardness is hilarious, as is the man’s retort to Randy’s availability to work at the weekend; “Isn’t that when you sit on other guy’s faces?’ Of course, these moments are fleeting, with Randy’s fumbling attempts to restore some harmony to his private life taking prominance. These attempts introduce to the audience Marisa Tomei as stripper Cassidy and Evan Rachel Wood as Randy’s daughter Stephanie, neither of whom wish to have the kind of relationship with him that he would ultimately like. While he gets much further with the gorgeous but, shall we say experienced, Cassidy than most other washed-up professional wrestlers would, it is the breakdown in his relationship with his daughter that proves to be the film’s most crushing blow. This subplot is genuinely affecting without ever toppling into sensationalism due to it’s bittersweet indictment of Randy’s character. Rourke offers such a powerfully honest portrait of Randy that we learn to love and sympathise with him, but even so we cannot ignore his flaws. We know that Randy cannot be a father to Stephanie, but it is testament to the film’s rock solid script and Rourke’s performance that many will shed a tear when he ultimately fails.

Ultimately the most pleasing aspect of The Wrestler is its art house influence, which allows Aronofsky to explore the many curiosities of Americana without forcing him into an overtly Hollywood style of filmmaking. Examples of this art cinema influence can be found throughout the film; from the documentary realism that results from the handheld camerawork to the film’s climax which forgoes the resolution of the standard Hollywood product. Aronofsky has stated that even before the script for the film was written he knew exactly how it would end and that getting to that point was the real challenge. The film displays an emotional resolution if nothing more – Randy ends up where he wants to be – but very little is resolved in the traditional narrative sense. Some will be put off, especially those who, weathered by years of watching nothing but Hollywood blockbusters, demand that every strand of plot is tied up in nothing but iron clad closure. But the final shot, striking as it is, tells us everything we need to know about Randy ‘The Ram’ Robinson – it is nothing but definitive and it has the potential to stick in the mind long after the film has finished, as does Bruce Springsteen’s heart-warming exit music, the lyrics of which echo the film’s themes flawlessly.

There is precious little wrong with The Wrestler. It is a film so simple in its construction and so forthright in its message that very little criticism can successfully be levelled against it. Aronofsky’s direction is more assured and less flashy than ever before despite the undoubted quality of his earlier work and in Rourke the still young director finds an actor who does for his film what no other actor could. An Oscar nomination for Rourke really is par for the course; a win would be nothing but deserved. The Wrestler is a great American film, one that will in time be cited as a classic and one that will stay in the memory of its viewers for longer than most others.


Watch a trailer for the film here.