The Wrestler

OK I admit it...like a moth to the flame, I've always been attracted to the bad boys of film… the edgy, twitchy guys...Clive Owen, John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, Jude Law in The Road to Perdition to name a few. For me it's not about looks, it's about that edginess. There is no bad boy more loved by me than Mickey Rourke. I fell in love with him in the film The Pope of Greenwich Village.

Sometimes life imitates art. In The Wrestler, art is imitating life. Mickey Rourke's real life is every bit as sadness evoking as that of the character he plays in The Wrestler, Randy Robinson. Rourke had very unsuccessful plastic surgery in the late 1990s and has had difficulty keeping his life from careening wildly about, making directors and producers leery of offering him roles. It’s sad. He’s talented. But, I think talent is like pretty…pretty is as pretty does…out of control talent is useless.

 

This movie is raw and brutal and gritty. I’m not just talking about the wrestling scenes which in and of themselves are difficult to watch. We meet one time wrestling circuit star Randy Robinson as he is not at all gracefully embracing his golden years. His glory days are gone, his body is giving out as much from lifestyle as from being slammed on the canvas and bounced off the ropes and he’s alone living in a rundown trailer park. He earns his living performing in B matches on the has-beens circuit, selling his autograph to old timers who might remember him from twenty years ago. Underneath all of this we see a core of kindness and gentleness still surviving in Randy. Rourke plays this role with such genuine insight and depth of feeling that I choose to believe that he and Randy are true alter-egos in every sense of the word.

Marisa Tomei is fabulous as Cassidy, an aging stripper with a nine year old son. Randy tries hard to get her to date him, a thing against the rules; lap dancers don’t date paying customers. Eventually she is drawn to his kindness and I think his true gentleness in the face of a brutal life. Tomei also turns in a really believable performance making the audience respect her wisdom and strength as we are mesmerized by a gritty life struggle that we can’t even begin to imagine.

In the end, this isn’t a movie one “loves” in the way one can love Gone With the Wind or The Sound of Music.  It’s too raw for loving. It’s a movie whose truth one can embrace, a movie whose humanity is the fundamental theme. All I’ve thought since I saw the movie is “there goes each of us if choices and circumstances in our lives had been different". I mean really, what’s the difference between a forty year old giving lap dances for her dollars to support her son and a forty year old face-lifted emotionally or physically abused golf widow staying in a rotten marriage to support her children? There is a scene in which Randy had re-established a relationship with the daughter he abandoned many years before. The daughter warily agrees to go out to dinner with him on Saturday. Randy starts his Saturday early by meeting a girl in a bar where they engage in bathroom stall sex, lots more drinking at her place and an evening of sex, indulging the girl’s fireman sex fetish. Needless to say, he misses the dinner date with his daughter who is devastated and once again severs her relationship with her Dad.

I know people like Randy, people who just can’t seem to learn from their past mistakes. They aren’t evil. They’re just incapable of “getting it.” It’s so easy to see strippers and dopers and homeless people as less human somehow, a sub-strata of society different from the rest of us. What happens to a forty year old stripper? Where does she go from there? Does she have a pension plan? There is a wonderful scene: The wrestler, at his supermarket day job, spends one afternoon working behind the deli counter. He's embarrassed at first, with his hair hidden behind a shower cap, but his gentle nature and good humor surface, and soon he's flirting, playing with customers and trying to do a good job. The scene shifts from a semi-comical odd juxtaposition to a vision of unsung grace, and one comes away thinking, "What a great soul" - and thinking also about other great souls, finding glory in hard or ridiculous places.

I guess the thing that stays with me after the movie is the very human fragility of the characters. They aren’t all that different than the rest of us. They want to love and be loved just like we do. They want to have regular lives just like ours, but somehow seem incapable of walking the path leading there. It is somehow beyond them, just beyond their understanding of how to get there. They aren’t bad people and in fact can often be quite likeable. They just seem perpetually lost.

If you like a happy ending, this isn’t the movie for you. If you can deal with life’s sometimes unpleasant underbelly and come away a more compassionate person for the experience, then this is the movie for you. It is superbly acted. I’ve seen Milk and leaned towards Sean Penn (another favorite Bad Boy of mine) to get the Best Actor Oscar. Now after seeing Mickey Rourke’s performance in The Wrestler, Rourke gets my vote. This isn’t a movie about wrestlers and strippers. It’s a movie about humanity.