Still some fight left

Mickey Rourke mounts a fascinating comeback
in Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler

BEAUTIFUL DECLINE: Marisa Tomei and Rourke

by MARK SLUTSKY

It’s officially the new movie genre of 2008: call it The ’80s Star in Winter. JCVD was a meditation on the long descent of action star Jean-Claude Van Damme, on celebrity, humiliation and self-consciousness. In a similar vein, now comes The Wrestler, which features another aging, tortured muscleman, Mickey Rourke.

The Wrestler isn’t as explicitly self-reflexive as JCVD, but the movie draws at least some of its power from the subtext of having Rourke play a former grappler looking for redemption. You can’t help compare the sight of Rourke’s battered and surgically altered face with your memory of his ’80s pretty-boy tough-guy looks, and the melancholy contrast is certainly intentional. As a fallen star, reduced to small-time fighting gigs and poorly attended autograph signings, living in a trailer park and sleeping in his car when he can’t make rent, Rourke is bowed but still proud—it’s a truly touching performance.

The film, which was written by former Onion editor Robert Siegel, is also a comeback of a kind for director Darren Aronofsky, whose last film, The Fountain, was an ambitious, pretentious, sci-fi fiasco. Like his star, he seems humbled here, and the result is his best film. With its drab, un-flashy (on the surface, at least) realism and long, meandering travelling shots, it would seem like Aronofsky has undergone a major stylistic shift as a filmmaker.

But don’t be fooled—the same attention to detail that seemed finicky and over-edited in Requiem for a Dream and pompous and grandiose in The Fountain has just shifted its focus here to something a little more thrift-store, and it’s a better fit.

Aronofsky dwells on the details of the small-time wrestling life: the trips to dollar stores to buy props, the staples embedded in Rourke’s flesh after a particularly flamboyant match. The opening shot, which pans across a multitude of ’80s wrestling ephemera—magazines, posters, trading cards—is a particularly beautiful touch.

Another thing hasn’t changed: Aronofsky is still, at heart, not a subtle filmmaker. You probably know where the story is going from the moment a doctor tells Rourke he’s not fit to go back into the ring, and his relationship with a lovely stripper-with-a-heart-of-gold (Marisa Tomei, who’s better than her character is written) is soggy with pathos. But despite that, like Rourke’s battered face, The Wrestler is flawed but still compelling and beautiful in its own strange way.

THE WRESTLER OPENS THIS
FRIDAY, DEC. 26