Wednesday, June 16, 2010

A Review Of The Wrestler

By Morgan Barber

What do you mean you haven't seen The Wrestler yet? It may well be one of the top ten movie downloads of the last decade! Everything you've head about this movie is true. Mickey Rourke gives the performance of a lifetime, making a strong comeback, and the film itself may well be director Darren Aronofsky's masterpiece.

Rourke's performance is the heart, the soul and the body of the film. He takes some real bumps and went through training to actually learn how to wrestle. That's really him in the ring. He had a stunt double for a few shots, but for the most part, that's really him. Randy the Ram is an incredible and very human character.

Randy's lifestyle has been self destructive, and it's cost him everything. He's paying the price, having lost touch with his daughter, and while he and the boys at the locker room are always close, he really doesn't have any true, close friends.

The movie will rip at your heart strings at the same time as it makes you feel a little more positive about life. The movie looks at Randy in a sincere light, portraying him as a real human being who's made a lot of big mistakes, but a real human being nonetheless. The movie is brutally honest without ever succumbing to the cruel pessimism you usually see in films that are "brutally honest".

Again, it's all about Mickey Rourke here. The story of the Wrestler is as much his as it is Randy's. Rourke himself has made a few mistakes, and just like Randy, was on the comeback trail. So the result is that he doesn't just play this role, he lived it. Interestingly, the role was going to go to Nicholas Cage, but Cage dropped out so that Rourke could take it.

They might have been able to secure a bigger budget had Cage stayed on, but the end result is a smaller, more intimate, personal movie, and it's all that much better for it. Rourke wrestles for small crowds, and it really drives home the fact that Randy gives his all to every show, whether he's wrestling for a few thousand fans or a few dozen. He really bleeds it out.

The story is an old one, the characters are stock, but it never feels cliche or predictable. The movie is invested with such real humanity that it really feels like a unique, one of a kind tale of loss and redemption. Even if you weren't so big on Pi and Requiem for a Dream, this may be Darren Aronofsky's masterpiece, and it certainly shows a deeper level of humanity than his previous efforts.

When you hear the acoustic song by Springsteen at the end, take a moment to reflect on what the ending really means. This movie has a lot of depth, and sits somewhere between Rocky and Raging Bull in the pantheon of sports movies. It is, at once, heart breaking and heart warming, both upbeat and tragic, and the ending really drives that home. At the very least, it's a story you'll never forget.

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