The Wrestler DVD

The main event in The Wrestler is, of course, the extraordinary return of Mickey Rourke. With his shirt off, and long, limp strands of dyed blonde hair hanging around his shoulders, Rourke now resembles a cross between a yeti and something one might glimpse in a butcher’s back room.
His faded wrestler Randy “the Ram” Robinson is a half-deaf, long-forgotten relic - big in the 80s, so they say - reduced to working the New Jersey circuit: fan conventions interspersed with staged bouts in school halls and community centres.

Not that he gives of himself any less. A warhorse continually struggling to patch himself up, Randy’s life changes when he goes down clutching his chest in the dressing room after a bout. One heart bypass later, he’s forced to adapt to civilian life, starting a sometimes paying, sometimes reciprocated relationship with a lapdancer named Cassidy (Marisa Tomei), and making an attempt to reconcile with his estranged daughter (Evan Rachel Wood), still resentful over all the birthdays dad
missed while out on the road.

Director Darren Aronofsky has great fun with the wrestling world, its special moves and character names, both revealing (and revelling in) the charade, while taking particular delight in pitching Rourke into new, unexpected, sometimes semi-improvised scenarios: truly, you haven’t lived until you’ve seen the actor in a hairnet, working the crowd at a deli counter. Yet underneath the Spandex, The Wrestler is a quietly profound study of a man addicted to pain, who needs to be being beaten up to feel anything at all.

Rourke brings notes of poignancy and desperation into the ring with him, as well as the obvious cuts and bruises, the signs performer and character alike have been in a fight, or struggle, with life. He makes magnificent the potentially ludicrous scene in which Randy quits his humdrum day job and transforms - like a live-action Hulk - into a bloody, brawling shirtless mess, and genuinely heroic the wrestler’s final leap into the void. As terrific as the Oscar-winning Sean Penn was in Milk, it’s hard not to think the Ram was robbed.

Mike McCahill on 28th April 2009
Author of 215 reviews