Watching The Wrestler is like watching a documentary about a wrestler who happens to be Mickey Rourke. That's how real it is. Mr. Rourke has said that when he initially read the script for The Wrestler, he didn't want to play the character, because it touched too close to home. But then he knew he had to play him, for that very reason.
Rourke is so over-the-top brilliant in this film that you can't help but smile and shake your head in amazement at what Rourke, the actor, manages to do. You're inside Randy. You know him, you feel what he feels, see what he sees. His sorrows, his realizations, his amusements, and desires sear their way inside you and go home with you after the show. Randy the Ram is not a character in a movie, not some kind of ridiculous inflated cartoon you can simply dismiss. He's a real man who leaps out at you from the silver screen just as he leaps onto his opponent in the ring. He's a man who laughs and cries and suffers, who walks out into the ring like a proud warrior embracing the sweet seductive lure of the crowd. And you see him clinging to something, something elusive, something lost, something he may not be able to get back.
The gut-wrenching blows he takes and even invites in the ring are nothing compared to the heart-wrenching blows he endures in 'real' life. And you wonder if you should look away. You're embarassed for him, for yourself. His soul is so naked on the screen.
Wrestling itself isn't the story; it's a vehicle. The real story is about a man who had something and lost it and who is trying to rebuild his life, but in the process he gets in his own way. As his own daughter tells him in a starkly painful scene, "You're a fuck-up." So he goes back to the only thing he knows, a place where in spite of unrelenting physical brutality, his emotions don't get hurt. "Out there" is the only place he gets hurt, he tells Cassidy, the strip club dancer played brilliantly by Marisa Tomei. It's the crowd who loves him, the crowd who doesn't hurt him and ultimately he sacrifices himself for that crowd, which is where he finds true solace.
Evan Rachel Wood plays Randy's estranged daughter, Stephanie. Ms. Wood plays the character with the utmost sensitivity and grace. We watch her carefully, afraid to miss the moment we anticipate, where she will remove a stone from the wall she has built around herself to protect her from the hurt put there by her father. When, tenderly and shyly, almost like a new lover, she rests her arm on his as they walk through what is now an abandoned amusement park, we want everything to be OK again between the two of them. We want, like we so often do in our own lives, to be able to take things back to an earlier time when what is now broken, was not.
The role of Cassidy could have easily have been played as a stereotype--some hard-assed hooker type with a soft spot for the hunky wrestler dude with long, stringy, dyed-blonde hair. But the way Ms. Tomei plays her, she is far from only that. Ms. Tomei reveals the character by shifting in and out of nuances that demonstrate the many sides to Cassidy. She parades her sensual body across the floor, writhes on the pole with frank, down-and-dirty sexuality, flicking her mane of hair around like angry flames. And all the while as we watch her, it seems she's totally there--as engrossed in her display of sexuality as she makes it appear. The atmosphere is a smoke-filled strip club in a seedy part of town, where the men pay to see what she's only too willing to show them. But there's a whole other person inside her that she keeps way more hidden than her body. And that's the part that Randy is after.
The Wrestler is a movie that does what good movies are supposed to do--transport you, take you to another place from where you usually live. And like a good movie also does, it takes you into realms of your own psyche, people you know or knew, and you perceive and understand all of that in a different way, with greater depth perhaps. An experience I would even call cathartic.
Directed by Darren Aronofsky, who also directed the brilliant and disturbing Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler drew a fair amount of attention this year, including an Oscar nomination for Best Actor for Mr. Rourke. And although Sean Penn was awarded the honor for his inspired portrayal of Harvey Milk, Rourke's no-holds-barred performance topped it, and showed everyone that he was solidly "back in the ring"--not merely as a worthy contender, but as a real champ.
