TIFF Review: The Wrestler

The Wrestler

Opening Date: 12/19/2008

TRAILER: n/a

ACCOMPLICES: Official Site

The Charge
Ram Jam! Ram Jam! Ram Jam!

Opening Statement
Winner of the prestigious Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, The Wrestler is a surprisingly mature, minimalist and sophisticated narrative from a director who, up until now, has made quite a different style of film.

Facts of the Case
Randy “The Ram” Robinson (Mickey Rourke, Sin City) was one of the most successful wrestlers of the 1980s, fighting in legendary matches that still live in infamy. He was a face, a good guy wrestler, who came out to American flags waving in the crowd, people screaming his name. But after a long and illustrious career, Randy finds his twilight years to be less than satisfying. Twenty years after his glory days, The Ram lives in a trailer, scrapes by wrestling small matches in the independent circuit, trying to keep his broken body together. He spends his days in a strip club, trying to attract the attention of Cassidy (Marisa Tomei, Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead).

When the twentieth anniversary of Randy’s legendary match, The Ram vs. Ayatollah approaching, promoters are eager to re-book the two iconic wrestlers for one final hurrah. The Ram attempts to bulk up his training regiment in preparation for the match, but his body gives out and he is hospitalized. Suddenly keenly aware of his own mortality and loneliness, he attempts to reconcile with his estranged daughter (Evan Rachel Wood, Thirteen) and form a relationship outside of the club with Cassidy. He even tries to give up wrestling, but the call of the ring is a powerful thing. Wrestling is all The Ram has ever known, and without it, he is just an old man working part-time at a grocery store.

The Evidence
Before screening the film to his audience, Darren Aronofsky sheepishly warned attendees that the film we were to see was not like any other film he has ever made before. Fans of his work know his films are deeply personal, ambitious and emotionally draining, and often at times akin to getting punched in the crotch. Here, he described The Wrestler as being very “minimalist”, and in style and presentation, this is most certainly true.

The Wrestler is the living embodiment of a “less is more” cinematic philosophy paying off in a big way. Aronofsky has constructed his most mature and stripped-down film of his career, and arguably his strongest work to-date. Where in previous offerings the director used a combination of emotional brutality and shock to pound into audiences feelings of despondency and distress, The Wrestler achieves its emotional impact without barely lifting a finger. The power is in the simplicity of the tale itself, in cajoling audiences to sympathize and relate to a lonely old man. Once we do, well, the hooks are in.

Fear not, wrestling haters; The Wrestler is a film with wrestling in it, but it isn’t a film about wrestling, like how Raging Bull and Rocky were not really boxing movies at all, but rather explorations of an individual and their triumphs and faults. The main difference here is that The Wrestler is like the anti-Rocky—we are not privy to the triumphs of the individual and their failures equally; we only get their failures. We meet The Ram at the end of his long, successful career, and we do not get to see him any other way: no flashbacks, no cuts, no escaping the reality of his decline. We do not get to see him make the mistakes that have lead him to this point—we only get to see an old man living with them. The ring is the place where The Ram belongs, even at the cost of Randy Robinson. Randy might live in a broken-down trailer and struggle to pay rent, but The Ram still gets the crowds calling his name, regardless of the size of the arena.

With shaky, muted, grainy and hand-held cinematography, following characters from behind the shoulders walking from room to room, The Wrestler is Aronofsky’s ugliest film to date, but deliberately so—no insult intended. There is no flash, no style, no camera trickery or complicated shots. This is minimalist filmmaking at its finest, with the camera free to go where it needs to go. It almost has a documentary feel to it, as if these were all real people we were somehow privy to following about, a few steps behind them as they go about their lives. Stripped away of all excessive sparkle, the cinematography is deliberately unflattering in order to match an unflattering man.

On the subject of wrestling, the filmmakers have done their homework. The Wrestler is unflinchingly honest in its portrayal of the sport, one that inspires devotion, love and obsession with both its fans and athletes. The Ram is a hodge-podge composite of notable wrestlers from the glory days of WWF wrestling in the eighties. For all the glory, the thrill and the triumph of the crowd shouting your name, the toll on the athlete is great, both in body and spirit. Endless travel leaves little time for a family life, and the constant abuse burns out wrestlers faster than an overheated transmission. Eventually, their bodies simply give up, leaving the wrestler unable to satisfy his most core instinct: get into the ring one more time, no matter what the cost. The film is detailed and accurate into its behind-the-scene look at the sport, showing both the glamorous and the unglamorous moments. Even for those with no interest in the sport itself, the end result is immaterial; Aronofsky could have called his film The Baseballer or The Footballer and the end effect would have been the same. The sport itself is not the linchpin to the narrative.

Being privy to the book end moments of a successful man’s life, a man whose glory days are long behind him, and whose days ahead are fewer and emptier than ever before, The Wrestler is honest, heartfelt and somber, extremely organic, almost evoking the feeling of a documentary; a living, breathing on-screen testimonial to The Ram unfolding in front of us. Perhaps the biggest achievement in The Wrestler is the bringing to life a quiet, reserved, lonely man via the most mannequin, plastic-looking actor in Hollywood today. Mickey Rourke is sensational in this role (the guy looks like a washed-out wrestler who has spent the last twenty years getting pounded in the face anyway) and he his passionate intensity will almost certainly land him an Oscar nomination.

His co-stars do respectable jobs here—Evan Rachel Wood as his estranged angry daughter, and Marisa Tomei as his stripper psudo-girlfriend—but they are easily outshined by Rourke. Of note is Tomei, who spends an awful lot of the film sans clothes. This is a good, good thing, but it falls outside of the, ah, critical scope of this review. Rourke’s performance captures such a brokenness in The Ram’s gaze, a profound sense of failure and loneliness as he comes to terms with his own declining health and battered body. For him, wrestling is all he knows; it is the thing that he sacrificed all other things for in his life, and now it is leaving him. What he does next is The Wrestler—it’s the whole film, nothing more, nothing less. Simple, yet profoundly complex and real.

Closing Statement
A triumph of narrative filmmaking, The Wrestler is Aronofsky’s most subtle and mature work to date, and also his most approachable. This is stripped down storytelling, isolated and blown up for all to see, a calibration of equal measure laughter and tears. It might not be the showiest of films, but it tells its tale with such candor, honesty and realism that the final effect is strikingly profound. It is a near-perfect tale of an imperfect man, full of emotional resonance.

The Verdict
A lot of people are going to get nominated for a lot of Oscars for this one, and deservedly so.

9/10

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