The Wrestler

For months the talk has been about how The Wrestler has resurrected the career of Mickey Rourke. The faded former star has won plaudits and awards for his performance as Randy Robinson in Darren Aronofsky’s unassuming epic about a washed-up wrestler looking for one last day of glory. Rourke, once the poster boy for celebrity casualty, is the hot tip for the Best Actor Oscar next month.

But the film is a comeback of sorts for the director too. Aronofsky’s early films; the paranoid freak-out Pi and drug-opera Requiem For A Dream, labelled him as a daring visionary, a conceptual genius with a hyperkinetic eye. The abject failure of his third film The Fountain, which had a big budget and even bigger ideas, caused his career to stall. The Wrestler restores his reputation as one of the best American directors working today.

We first meet Randy “The Ram” Robinson as he sits slumped in a chair in a corner of a room. His back is to the camera, his shoulders heaving. It’s an archetypal sports-movie shot, a still moment of exhaustion after superhuman effort. Then, we realise the chair Randy is perched on is far too small for his meaty frame. There are finger paintings on the wall. It’s a kindergarten, co-opted as a changing room for a small-time wrestling exhibition in the next-door school gym.

Randy was a big star once, but that once was twenty years ago. He was a big draw in the professional wrestling game, an American hero in a peculiarly American sport, grappling the bad guys in choreographed, pre-ordained bouts on television every weekend. He made some money but he lost it all to a divorce and, the film hints, drugs and booze. Now, well past his prime, Randy is still pounding the canvas in gyms and halls on the amateur circuit, punishing his body for a cut of the takings on the door.

In between these increasingly bloody and prolonged matches, Aronofsky delivers a straight edged, emotionally complicated drama about loss and redemption. The director reins in his more elaborate visual tendencies, allowing the actors, not the camera or the editing, to communicate emotion. The same realism extends to the concrete halls, trailer parks and windblown New Jersey streets that Aronofsky employs as a backdrop. These are half-forgotten places, as run-down and obsolete as the characters.

After an incident that lands him in the hospital, Randy looks to reconcile with his estranged daughter, Stephanie (Evan Rachel Wood). She has grown up without him and hates him for it. When the girl rebuffs his clumsy attempts at a reunion, Randy asks his only friend, a stripper named Cassidy (Marisa Tomei), to help him make a connection. She is a thirty-something mother of one, who like Randy, keeps doing what she has always done because she doesn’t know what else to do. They are both performers, experts at faking something the viewer wants to believe is real; sex and violence. The Wrestler is about what happens when the audience stop responding.

Then, a chink of light. Randy is offered a lucrative rematch against an old foe at a big-time reunion tour. He puts in extra hours at his supermarket job to pay for the steroids, fake tan and hair dye he uses to look his best but it might be one fight too much for his failing body.

The Wrestler is a poignant and perceptive film with an extraordinary central performance from Rourke; tender and tough, quiet and full of rage. Randy is a once-in-a-lifetime role for the actor and he knows it. Under Aronofsky’s unobtrusive direction, Rourke rediscovers the force and nervy charm that made him a star in the first place. The result is a masterful assembly of hundreds of tiny moments of authentic expression that combine into something unforgettable.

Spring hasn’t yet sprung but in The Wrestler and Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, we might have already seen the best films of 2009.