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The first shot of Rourke’s face is noticeably delayed; we are stuck behind the hulking frame of the wrestler for quite some time before his visage is exposed, and when it is finally unveiled, pretty it ain’t: Donatella Versace on steroids after a bar brawl. The most remarkable achievement of this film isn’t the resurrection of Rourke’s career, it’s the fact that he can still express himself so touchingly through such a startling mahogany mask. He must have the most expressive eyes in Hollywood.

With his body beginning to fail, his relationship with his estranged daughter a car wreck, and money hard to come by, there’s nothing much going for Randy save for a flirtation with a local stripper named Cassidy (aka Pam), and the admiration of die-hard wrestling fans.

It’s already 20 years since his heyday, but there’s almost a sense that he’s been around since the dawn of time, that he’s never been young. Although he sighs, grunts, and complains, there’s always a glint in his eye, a sweetness and wisdom. He seems as old as the earth, and his struggle in the face of a pretty bleak reality brings to mind Sisyphus.

He just keeps going. He tries reaching out to his daughter, who seems determined not to accept his advances. At the supermarket he slogs it out in the face of bleak indifference, trying to enliven his pedestrian existence though playful interactions with stony-faced customers. And though we are a bit too literally shown us the parallels between backstage at the ring, and backstage at the supermarket, it’s a fair point: life is about performance. Smaller experiences can be just as terrifying as an appearance in front of thousands. And while both main characters have stage names as well as birth names, the difference is that while Pam feels repressed by her stage name, for Randy the Ram it’s liberation.

Randy’s fledgling romance with Pam, and the tenderness behind his advances, provides one of the film’s greatest pleasures. There’s a childlike honesty to his interactions with others, and maybe that’s his problem – he’s a child making an adult’s decisions: free from many of society’s constraints, but at the same time hopelessly entangled in them. Indeed, his only trouble-free relationships are with the local kids at his trailer park, to whom he is a wrestling god, but even here he is short changed. In a poignant scene, he tries to convince one kid to keep playing his hopelessly outdated computer game to no avail. The kid politely makes his excuses and Randy is alone again.

As the stripper with a heart of gold, Marisa Tomei turns in a very human and believable performance. Together with Rourke she manages to negotiate the signposted plot developments served up to their characters thanks to some no-bullshit acting and believable chemistry. And in an intense and furious performance, Evan Rachel Wood is brilliant as Randy’s daughter Stephanie, again overcoming a conventional story arc to access the hopeless anger of a young woman exhausted by the failures of her unreliable father.
Aronofsky’s wise decision to film in an immediate, gritty fashion gives the film the authentic look it needs to transcend the script’s lapses into formula.

The world of wrestling is portrayed as a close-knit, affectionate brotherhood, full of camaraderie and consultation about whatever crazy (and often eye-watering) stunt they’re about to serve up. The fighting scenes are alternately amusing and operatic: this is where Randy feels at home, most alive, and accepted. It’s his family, for better or worse.

At one point, Randy says ‘I don’t feel like Hercules’, and indeed that’s true: he’s actually Achilles, physically imposing, but bound for tragedy.

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originally posted: 02/04/09 21:14:09
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