***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. The credits for cinematographer Maryse Alberti and editor Andrew Weisblum–Aronofsky normally collaborates with the flashier Matthew Libatique and Jay Rabinowitz, respectively–suggest a certain putting-away of toys for the director, who confines his intercutting technique to one dazzling sequence (juxtaposing an exhibition match with its locker-room aftermath, it unfolds like the love scene from Don't Look Now) and seems to have a renewed faith in subtext, as indicated by the puny supermarket manager (Todd Barry) who humiliates Ram at every opportunity ("Don't you spend Saturdays sitting on other guy's faces?" he says in response to Ram's request for an extra shift), clearly but not explicitly seeing Ram as some proxy for the school bully. That's what makes a subplot involving Ram's attempts to reconcile with his estranged daughter (Evan Rachel Wood, who's slowly being remade, Vertigo-style, into a Dita Von Teese clone by boyfriend Marilyn Manson) such a glaring misstep: Virtually the first words out of her mouth are a painfully expositional summary of Ram's failings as a parent, and she's shown the exit in a way that hastens as well as cheapens Ram's inevitable relapse. Nevertheless, the pathos of those final shots feels earned; The Wrestler bears out as the most haunting sports film, or rather the most haunting film about the margins of a sport, since Fat City. PROGRAMME: Special Presentations
