The Wrestler

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.

The Passion of Joan of Arc

Renee Maria Falconetti plays Joan of Arc with such stark realism that it's as if she were born to play the Maid of Orleans. The remarkably intense interplay between her face and the camera is incomparable to any other I've seen on film. Not even Ingmar Bergman's consistently brilliant direction nor the immense talent of his pool of actors have been able to achieve what Ms. Falconetti manages to do in this role. Her performance ceases to be good acting and crosses into the realm of simply being. And keep in mind that her role, like the entire film, is silent.

Shot in 1928, The Passion of Joan of Arc can easily be considered the best silent film ever made. Not just for Ms. Falconetti's striking performance, which is perhaps the most amazing rendition of what the face can express ever caught on film; but also for the tableau lighting, the exquisite understanding of shadows, lights and darks, the Expressionistic set, and for the depiction of a time in history--captured in dress, mood, activity, and attitude. The French director Jean Cocteau said it played like ``an historical document from an era in which the cinema didn't exist.''


It's been said by many that the eyes are the mirror of the soul. But in this film, Ms. Falconetti's eyes are a totally transparent window. Every nuance of Joan's feelings are as clear and pure as the soft petal-like tears that fall from her eyes without even so much as a hint of 'acting.' Her unabashed display of emotion is like that of an innocent child blamed harshly for something she did not do. Watching this woman, with her face in such closeup, is an intimate, hynoptic, and unsettling experience. And this complete openness of character and steadfast courage is visibly unsettling to her inquisitors, determined to condemn her for heresy or to receive from her a confession of guilt.

As she burns at the stake--amidst the cruel ravages of smoke and flames, she speaks to God, telling Him softly that she hopes she will be with Him that night. The camera stays focused on her face, cutting away now and then to show the piles of burning sticks encircling the stake where she is tied. Her eyes are transfixed on the cross that Massieu holds high for her to see. And finally, before the flames and smoke engulf her, we see her passion. A gentle release, her head falls forward; and the thickening smoke rises above her head and screens her entirely from the townspeople and our view.

The townspeople are agitated, angered at the outrageous act that has taken place before them. Women clutch their children to their breasts, people huddle together in inconsolable horror. Weapons are lowered from the tops of the crenalated walls of a fortress. The soldiers grab these heavy spiked iron balls on chains and begin swinging them around, beating the angered and impassioned townspeople indiscriminately. "You have murdered a saint," cries one of the onlookers, an elderly man who is subsequently beaten to the ground by an angry soldier. The camera pulls away to reveal a town in smoke and flames and chaos. A lasting vision of destruction.

Carl Theodore Dreyer, famed Danish director of silent films cast Ms. Falconetti in the role of Joan of Arc after seeing her in a play in Paris. It was to be the only film she ever made. Antonin Artaud, French poet, essayist, playwright, actor, and director has a role in this film as well. He plays the role of Massieu.

No Country for Old Men

Javier Bardem is the focus of this film, the focus of the story, and the focus period. His performance leaps out at you, like a panther in the jungle who stealthily watches you from afar until the moment he leaps at your throat, twisting and turning you. Your heart racing, your belief suspended, you struggle to survive. Within the first five minutes Ifelt like this--trapped, captured, wondering if i could/should continue watching the film. Because what i saw before me on the movie screen transcended make-believe.

Bardem has always been extraordinary--in diverse roles that range from a Cuban poet dying of AIDS to a police detective shot down during a confrontation and paralyzed from the waist down. He's starred in A Sea Inside, Before Night Falls, Jamon, Jamon, and Live Flesh--to name just of few of his phenomenal performances. In No Country for Old Men, Bardem plays Anton Chigurh, an emotionless killer who within the first few minutes of the film kills his arresting officer by strangling him with his handcuffs, and soon after uses a cattle stun gun (that he carries around as nonchalantly as most of us carry our wallets) to kill the driver of a car he suddenly decides he wants.

The story centers around a drug deal gone bad. Multiple murders. A guy who chances on the money from the deal--Llewellan Moss (Josh Brolin), takes it and then has the Bardem character hot on his heals with all the stuff that goes with a guy who is essentially proof that the devil exists . . .

Shot in Texas and New Mexico, the desolation of the area speaks of lawlessness that has somehow survived from the days of the Old West. And yet there is an order and simplicity to those who abide the law, as if they can't see or acknowledge the presence of the likes of Chigurh. When asked to throw a coin, a shopkeeper moves along with the game, somehow not giving in to what he must know is clear: if he doesn't call it right, he's about to lose his life.

Some of the character actors are so good you swear they were spotted in some soda shop or gas station in West Texas and are just playing themselves. But Bardem is on a level all his own. He portrays the kind of frightening that makes you queasy. I don't mean in terms of blood and gore, but in the sense of the numbing, gut-wrenching feeling you get from staring at pure evil. Lke looking into the eyes of Charlie Manson. That's why it was often difficult to watch the film. I didn't want affirmation that the devil exists. And yet I was drawn to the utter dakness and sociopathic perfection of Bardem's character.

Written and directed by the Coen brothers, also starring Tommy Lee Jones as the local county sheriff, Ed Tom Bell, this movie does justice to the dark visions of Cormac McCarthy's novel, upon which the movie is based. Jone's character is an old man who doesn't understand the evil that walks the land, even though he's been dealing with it all his adult life. And we're left to wonder, like him, what kind of country this is that allows the likes of Bardem's character to survive.