Mickey Rourke in "The Wrestler," Fox Searchlight, 2008

What can be said, post-Oscar-fuggup, about this sick-hearted anti-American Dream that hasn't already been said, and kudoed: Darren Aronofsky's channeling of the Dardennes' immediacy, Mickey Rourke's Herculean self-deprecation, both of which currents combining to prove the script's essential conventionality to be irrelevant, just at a moment in American film in which we had all good reason to think the Industry was completely bankrupt of balls, curiosity, respect and a sense of America itself. (Let's consider in this broad formulation that 2007 was a modern aberration, unleashing a wave of nation-autopsying megaworks -- "There Will Be Blood," "The Assassination of Jesse James," "No Country for Old Men," "Zodiac," etc. -- the likes of which have not been seen since at least 1991; as in, "My Own Private Idaho," "The Rapture," "Slacker," "Tribulation 99," "Naked Lunch," et al.)

However you cube it, "The Wrestler" is a gift, for the most part because Rourke was not transforming himself into a preconceived character so much as simply living it, putting his own catastrophes on the table, sacrificing his own body for the sake of the character's sadness, taking on the story's essentially Sisyphean nature as if it were his own Calvary. It's an achievement -- far more substantial than Sean Penn's Harvey Milk impersonation -- that resembles the tribulational experience at the heart of a Wiseman or Maysles documentary, more "Grey Gardens" than Method, more self-conscious reality then calculated artifice. Once Rourke was a peerless realist craftsman, but here he's a found object, incontestable and painful. The mortal fear in his eyes, not in mid-staple-gun-&-barbed-wire assault but even earlier, in the first bouts we see, speaks unprecedented volumes about the cold and merciless heart of American popular culture.

Which is what "The Wrestler" comes down to in terms of text -- a lacerating bad-breath vision of exactly how our culture creates and then devours idols, leaving the humiliated, fame-haunted detritus of our media distractions shambling across the landscape in broken old age like stray dogs hunting for roadside scraps. American entertainment culture eats its young, and anyone entering into it for the sake of stage love or glory will most likely end up an embarrassing wreck, trying to get gin mill band gigs or doing dinner theater in Dayton or hawking adult diapers on late-night TV or, as with Rourke's Randy the Ram, playacting a comic-book brawl in a South Jersey VFW hall, at an age when he absolutely shouldn't.

It's scary to consider how much of the audience for "The Wrestler" -- nearly $30 million in box office receipts in this country, for a film that cost $7 million -- have seen it because of their affection for the milieu, and it's even scarier to contemplate how many viewers misunderstood the film's implicit critique of the brutal idiocy of professional wrestling and its lower echelons, and, by extension, the bloodsport instinct oozing from so much of American life. Randy is a pathetic victim, and the film is a majestic tragedy.

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lkovarik

Re: the Wrestler

Thanks for such an astute and thoughtful article on a performance (and film) so criminally undervalued by the Academy- best actor nomination aside. The voters proved just how woefully out of touch they are.

The good news is, as you suggested, the American film industry shows promise and guts again and Darren Aronovsky is at the forefront of the charge.

I came to the Wrestler not as a fan of the sport, but to witness the magic that Mickey Rourke could bring with material finally worthy of his inimitably visceral presence and he was absolutely arresting. The Wrestler was beautiful decay, it was poetic desolation tempered with warmth. I had to see it multiple times in order to verify that my reaction was warranted.

Still, I respectfully disagree with your depiction of Randy as a “pathetic victim”. He was a warrior who refused to give up without a fight and though there is something hauntingly sad in that, such a simple fact is ultimately redeeming and transcendent. Aronovsky spared us his grim, knowable demise and I like to think this was the reason. Randy donned the tights one last time because he had to on a cellular level, and the roar of the crowd he dreamily remembered while getting a lapdance might have been a motivator, but it was the eerie song of his ravaged pride that propelled him despite the human carnage strewn behind him. Pathetic? perhaps. But never a victim.

Lisa Kovarik