In the interests of full disclosure, I’m a fool for a quietly rendered story of existential crisis, human failing, and the arbitrary casualties of life. It just…it hits me. In my heart bone.
So there was every chance I was going to fall for Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler. For one – as is well documented – Mickey Rourke is a living, breathing, slightly angrier real life manifestation of this kind of tragedy. After being touted in the early 90’s as the saviour of the cinema ‘tough guy’, he spectacularly fell from grace, bang into a wall of drugs, alcoholism, abominable plastic surgery and other acts of disastrous hedonism. He plumbed the depths of personal and cinematic disgrace, until Tarantino and Rodriguez threw him a lifeline by controversially casting him in Sin City. On the back of his bristling, electric performance, Aronofsky fought tooth and nail to have Rourke play Ricky ‘The Ram’ Robinson in The Wrestler. Several financiers spooked and abandoned the project but Aronofsky wouldn’t budge on the casting, meaning the scale of the film was seriously downsized.
Rourke paid back that faith with interest, delivering a muscular, nuanced and utterly compelling performance. Pathos, you ask? In spades. Heaped, fresh spades. He is revelatory and utterly convincing at once, and deserves more than his Oscar nomination. Rourke deserves to hold the statue aloft.
Robert Siegel’s script is deceptively simple – essentially a two hander between lost souls, wonderfully reminiscent of the Marlon Brando classic On the Waterfront. Evan Rachel Wood makes a stunning turn in a handful of scenes as Ricky’s estranged daughter, but the real revelation – even more so than Rourke – is the usually beige Marisa Tomei delivering a performance of gravity and charm as a single mother stripper striving for a better life.
Ambition and desperate loneliness birth each other as the arbitrary turns in life throw these beautifully tragic characters through the alleys of life. The Wrestler is pessimistic and unapologetically bitter at times, but rarely have I spent such satisfying time in the cinema.
So there was every chance I was going to fall for Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler. For one – as is well documented – Mickey Rourke is a living, breathing, slightly angrier real life manifestation of this kind of tragedy. After being touted in the early 90’s as the saviour of the cinema ‘tough guy’, he spectacularly fell from grace, bang into a wall of drugs, alcoholism, abominable plastic surgery and other acts of disastrous hedonism. He plumbed the depths of personal and cinematic disgrace, until Tarantino and Rodriguez threw him a lifeline by controversially casting him in Sin City. On the back of his bristling, electric performance, Aronofsky fought tooth and nail to have Rourke play Ricky ‘The Ram’ Robinson in The Wrestler. Several financiers spooked and abandoned the project but Aronofsky wouldn’t budge on the casting, meaning the scale of the film was seriously downsized.
Rourke paid back that faith with interest, delivering a muscular, nuanced and utterly compelling performance. Pathos, you ask? In spades. Heaped, fresh spades. He is revelatory and utterly convincing at once, and deserves more than his Oscar nomination. Rourke deserves to hold the statue aloft.
Robert Siegel’s script is deceptively simple – essentially a two hander between lost souls, wonderfully reminiscent of the Marlon Brando classic On the Waterfront. Evan Rachel Wood makes a stunning turn in a handful of scenes as Ricky’s estranged daughter, but the real revelation – even more so than Rourke – is the usually beige Marisa Tomei delivering a performance of gravity and charm as a single mother stripper striving for a better life.
Ambition and desperate loneliness birth each other as the arbitrary turns in life throw these beautifully tragic characters through the alleys of life. The Wrestler is pessimistic and unapologetically bitter at times, but rarely have I spent such satisfying time in the cinema.
Life doesn’t have to be pretty to be spectacular.
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