***½/****
starring Mickey Rourke, Marisa Tomei, Evan Rachel Wood, Todd Barry
screenplay by Robert Siegel
directed by Darren Aronofsky
by Bill Chambers Mickey Rourke has spent the Aughties staging a series of mini-comebacks, but they’ve mostly sidestepped his iconography in favour of transforming him into a character actor. Not so Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, which is poignant largely for how it reflects and refracts the Mickey Rourke mystique. Quite aware of his film’s ghoulish appeal, Aronofsky, after spotlighting the visage of young, beautiful Mickey Rourke under the main titles, shields Rourke’s face from view long enough that even though we know what he looks like now (that detour into prizefighting and God knows how many botched surgeries really took their toll), his first close-up still causes momentary grief. But the film is not just about lost youth, Rourke’s or otherwise (44-year-old Marisa Tomei, reacquainting Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead viewers with her breasts, God bless her, plays the kind of stripper pitied by her clientele): it’s about how the culture of ’80s nostalgia–arguably the dominant culture–is like Lenny from Of Mice and Men, arrested in a childlike state and unable to resist squeezing the life out of Reagan-era totems. Wrestling, meanwhile, proves to be the perfect analogue for acting in that its Golden Age, like Rourke’s, was somewhere around 1987, the year of Angel Heart and the seminal WrestleMania III; when Rourke’s washed-up Randy “The Ram” Robinson, permanently cast out of the ring by a heart attack, challenges a neighbourhood kid to a game of Nintendo wrestling, suffice it to say the conflation of relics is nothing less than poetic.
