The Wrestler

By Carolyn Vallejo

Randy “the Ram” Robinson doesn’t just want to blur the line between fantasy and reality in Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler; he wants to break it, bruise it, put it in a headlock and possibly take a staple gun to its forehead. Following Randy, played by Mickey Rourke, and his waning wrestling career, the film watches the aging giant respond to his eroding life as he goes through the midlife crisis he never had some 20 years ago. For a film about nearly naked meaty men pounding on each other, the viewer feels oddly and extremely sympathetic toward these people. If you want to make an audience connect to a character so much that it will cry with him, the story of The Wrestler does not seem like a likely candidate; yet the film miraculously and gracefully hits the mark.

From the very first scene to throughout most of the movie, the camera follows Randy from behind – a looming, devilish presence of bad luck that watches the wrestler’s every move. We watch Randy’s giant shoulders and Barbie-blonde hair as he desperately tries to bring back his ‘80s-rock-star lifestyle, and, when he attempts to accept that it’s gone, tries to invent a life for himself in the real world. The Wrestler sweats with themes of old age, trying to relive the past and grappling with the decision to live in fantasy or reality.

One of the prominent symptoms of Randy’s stuck-in-the-‘80s disease is the film’s music: Heavy-metal hair bands take the wrestler back to the good ol’ days. The movie uses Guns N’ Roses’ high-pitched screams to its advantage, developing a series of sound cutoffs that highlights the contrast between Randy’s fantasy of rock and the dismal, grey reality of his life. For a few seconds, the wrestler will be taken away, back to that place with tight pants and Axl Rose’s wails, when suddenly the sound dramatically cuts to the low humming of the fluorescent lights in the supermarket storage room in which Randy works. It’s no wonder that The Ram paired his grand entrance into the wrestling ring with “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” the song of an ‘80s champion, an escape from the life into which reality is trying to force him. Viewers can already see by this point why Mickey Rourke may have been perfect for the role: as a boxer, the actor’s opening song was the same Axl Rose-wailing ballad.

Wrestlers trick some into believing their body slams and bloody gashes are real. While the film reveals many truths to these performances – the seemingly blood-thirsty, ready-to-kill wrestlers joke with and even hug each other backstage – Randy himself is tricked by the glory that wrestling brings. In some parts of the film, it seems Randy is well aware that wrestling is just a fantasy, but he doesn’t care. Randy is broke, living in a trailer park and tempted by his former rival for a rematch. He grapples with this possiblity to relive his glory days, but this chance is seemingly lost, forcing him to accept the real world as his fate.

One of the most disturbing scenes in the film reveals that wrestling can be all too real. Randy exhaustedly enters backstage after a brutal show that occurred 14 minutes before. A flashback shows, the match starting off as a barbaric slapping fest between The Ram and his opponent, which escalates to a circus that includes barbed wire, thumbtacks, a staple gun and a ladder. The scene is comparable to a Saw film, only here the victims are being tortured by choice. When it’s all over, Randy returns so the paramedics can casually wedge out the tacks from his back. The fighting proves too much for Randy’s body, and a few minutes later he goes into cardiac arrest.

It is only his brush with death that slaps Randy awake from his dream. Forced to retire from wrestling, the poor guy has no idea what to do with himself and pathetically tries to keep up his act of being a youngster. Recovering from bypass surgery, Randy actually calls one of the neighborhood boys over to play old-school Nintendo. But the attempt at being a kid backfires, and Randy feels like an old man when he has no idea what Call of Duty Four is. Even worse, the 11-year-old decides he is too cool to hang with a wrestler and ditches him after one game.

To the relief of the audience, Randy seems to say “enough is enough,” and attempts to grow up. Viewers feel as if they’re urging on a toddler to try to walk again even after he has fallen down countless times when they watch Randy try to revive the relationship with his daughter that he destroyed in the pinnacle of his career, and even when he tries to make a real relationship out of his stripper fantasy-girlfriend, Cassidy (Marisa Tomei). You actually want Randy to succeed, even after his daughter’s reluctance to accept her father back in her life because he’s been missing for so many years. What’s amazing about The Wrestler is that even though Randy brought upon himself all of his pitiful suffering, the viewer still wants him to not be alone, to have love in his life. Aronofsky creates this same internal struggle in viewers with Requiem for a Dream, in which all of the drug-addicted characters crafted their own demise – you still just can’t help but wish them happiness, but watch helplessly as they keep plummeting.

For Randy, there’s actually a chance for happiness – for about a minute. The grey winter, which only departs from the screen when the camera focuses on a bright, whimsical wrestling ring, is present even during that one moment of emotional bonding time between father and daughter. At this point the film gets a bit too pathetically depressing with Aronofsky’s close-up of Randy as he and his daughter try to work out their past; the wrestler’s face is wrinkled with old age and over-tanning, tears streaming down the face of a man who makes a living demonstrating his masculinity. The two gently share a dance in a broken-down ballroom with peeling paint and smashed windows at an ocean-side amusement park – a scene that, although a little like a bad chick-flick, reveals the ability for love to shine through, even when everything around you is destroyed and wasting away.

But, as The Wrestler cruelly reminds us, life doesn’t work out that way, and reality hits hardest when his relapse into the rock-star lifestyle of blowing lines in bathroom stalls and one night stands with bar girls ruins that glimmer of hope for a father-daughter relationship – all part of Aronofsky’s plan to toy with viewers’ hearts. Naturally, Randy goes back to his neon glitter spandex and hits the ring again, perhaps for the last time his body will allow, thus ruining any chance with Cassidy as well.

Marisa Tomei, a usually bubbly, beautiful actress who played such characters in films like What Women Want and Anger Management, takes viewers to another, darker place with her portrayal of Cassidy. A stripper is not an easy character for an actress to make loveable, but her aging body, used, a bit wrinkled and weighed down by the gravity of a hard life, and her warm eyes draw the audience into her world and create a desire for her to find love, preferably with Randy. Tomei shows she is fearless to strip herself and bare all, physically and emotionally, as we see the human, vulnerable side of a thick-skinned dancer.

Mickey Rourke’s character in The Wrestler is comparable to his role of Marv in Sin City – a rundown, ex-big shot looking for love with strippers and struggling to find a place in the real world. Yet Randy’s story runs so much deeper. It attaches itself to the heart of the audience. No matter how depressed or crappy you feel throughout the whole film, you can’t deny how masterfully it is crafted. Aronofsky took a chance working with the notoriously diva-like Rourke, yet no one would be able to tell from watching The Wrestler, an improbable masterpiece for the year in movies.