MOVIE REVIEW: The Wrestler (15)

A decade after grabbing audiences by the throat with the superb Pi, and later bending their minds with Requiem For A Dream, maverick director Darren Aronofsky seems to have taken his unusual view on the world to more mainstream projects. In 2010 he is due to reinvent 80’s Sci-Fi icon Robocop, but first he is visiting the world of pro-wrestling in The Wrestler.

Randy ‘The Ram’ Robinson (Mickey Rourke) was the biggest wrestler in the world in 1989, where he wrestled ring enemy ‘The Ayatollah’ in front of a packed stadium and a cable audience of millions. Twenty years on, things aren’t so good. Randy is living out of a trailer, wrestling on the independent circuit in high school gyms and stacking shelves at a supermarket to make ends meet. The film follows Randy as he attempts to rebuild his relationship with his daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) and get close to an ageing stripper (Marisa Tomei), and decide whether to fight one last match, despite years of drug abuse meaning it could kill him.

Before you balk, this is not a movie about wrestling. Certainly, there’s a lot about the nature of the independent circuit, but it could have easily have been about a failed rock star or football player. The story is about Randy, a man wading through the wreckage of his life, only working out what really matters several years too late. It’s also a fable about the fickle and destructive nature of fame, and the human debris it leaves in it’s wake, with Aronofsky’s ‘over the shoulder’ style making it seem all the more real.

At the beginning of this decade, Mickey Rourke was one of Hollywood’s most famous missed opportunities. Several inconceivably bad decisions (turning down both the lead in The Untouchables and Bruce Willis’ role in Pulp Fiction). Since then film fans have waited for a performance that was not only a glimpse of the great actor he was in the 1980’s, but one that delivered the potential those roles showed. This is that performance. Rourke is subtle, endearing, a little oafish, but above all totally believable and magnetic. Randy is a man that doesn’t deserve a second chance, but in the genuinely emotional final scene just try and not root for him.

Strong support from Tomei and Wood, but in the end this is Rourke and Aronofsky’s show. The director shows he can deliver a human story, and Rourke is perfectly cast, delivering quite a few moving scenes and proving a brilliant figure head for a tremendous story. Fantastic.

The Wrestler is out January 16.