the wrestler

The Wrestler (2008)
directed by Darren Aronofsky
****

I remember when I first heard that Darren Aronofsky — the unbounded, creative mind behind Pi, Requiem for a Dream and The Fountain — was making a film about a professional wrestler. I was dumbfounded. And then I was curious. This, after all, was the director so talented that I had said I'd watch him direct the telephone directory.

If memory serves me, I also said he's a taste not for everyone. Pi, an intellectual, black & white film, was about our longing to understand life. Requiem for a Dream, a highly emotional, blazingly color film, was about the wages of sin, as well as their pleasures for a season. The Fountain, an unorthodox science fiction film that blurred emotion and intellect, was about the irretrievable distance we create by our own selfishness.

The Wrestler, if I have to keep using that terrible expression "about", is about disappointment. It's also about stewarding what we've been given (like our bodies, for instance). It's about sacrifices and whether they're worth making. Ultimately, which surprised me, it seems to be about Christ, in photographic negative. And before I get you so interested at this point that you drop the review to go rent it, The Wrestler is also packed full of POE. If nudity and sexuality, or violence and profanity make it a challenge for you to profit from a film, you might want to think twice.

Struggling toward Redemption
Randy "the Ram" Robinson (it's really Radnzinski) is at the end of a brutal but successful career in professional wrestling. Yes, that wrestling - TV wrestling, where all of it's planned but most of it also really hurts. The wrestling scenes alone in this film are remarkably real, human, and painful to watch. After one particularly gruesome fight (involving a stapler), Randy is helped by the medics [this is actually a standard part of the fight day] and, left alone in the locker room, drops to the ground with a heart attack. This is where the film starts.

According to his doctor, Randy has no business wrestling any more, and could kill himself if he tries. The mid-life crisis this provokes is a little different than it would be for most people. After all, Randy's made his living as a sort of celebrity, one where being at the peak of bodily performance is a necessity. He's also beat himself up enough by doing it that he wears a hearing aid and lives on pain medications.

He doesn't have many friends — in fact, the only two are a neighborhood boy whom he challenges to wrestling video game matches, and Cassidy, an exotic dancer. Cassidy is The Wrestler's other main character, and it becomes obvious that the plot wants us to think about how we use our bodies. Perhaps the symbol is meant to be much more wide-ranging, presenting us with ways that two people use (and abuse) their bodies, to provoke us to think about how we use any of ourselves - body, mind, spirit. Randy's story and Cassidy's are going to interweave, and it's going to challenge each of them to confront the way they've wasted their lives.

If I haven't yet interested you in the film, that's OK. For those of you who may still be interested, the thing that keeps this from being Rocky XXVIII and instead makes it one of the most human, moving films of the year is how it's made. Aronofsky knows how to create a character, and he knows how to stage a scene. I've done by best to keep from talking about 3/4 of the film, since there is such a quiet beauty about the way the film unfolds. So many scenes are masterful, loaded with meaning, subtle as real life. Randy's character is one of the most unexpectedly thought-provoking that I've seen on film, and his journey toward figuring out what redemption might mean is fascinating. It reminded me of something made in the 70s heyday of the Brat Pack, but with the sensitive sophistication that has only been possible in the 2000s.

Of course, when, 1/3 of the way through the film, Cassidy mourns over Randy's most recent injuries and says, "He was wounded for our transgressions; he was bruised for our iniquities", we realize that we're supposed to be contemplating a level beyond this film's story. To insist that Randy is a Christ-figure is to think too shallowly. He's not, just as there is no Christ-figure in The Lord of the Rings. Here, in The Wrestler, the struggle for reconciliation, for bodily sacrifice, for a being lifted up that will draw people, can never accomplish anything more than a limited, momentary, imperfect redemption. Everyone in this film seems to realize, though, that while they realize the limitations of their own life's redemption, there is a reason the concept seems so profound, such a stark, compelling photographic negative of their own lives.

It's one of the most unexpectedly great films of the year.

Warning: As I mentioned earlier, this film does contain a great many POE. Please read a bit more about it before deciding whether it's a good fit for you.

Comments

[Danny]

This was the most emotionallly effective movie of the year. Darren Aronofsky made decisions to save this film like the casting of Rourke and the handheld documentary style of filming. If the movie was in other hands, it could've come off as corny and overly dramatic, but Aronofsky paints such a real portrait of a broken man that we believe everything we are seeing.

[Jordan M. Poss]

This is a real heartbreaker of a movie--it tore me up, especially this line near the end: "The only place I get hurt is out there."

Thanks for your thoughts. The parallels between Randy and Cassidy's misuse of their bodies was something that hadn't occurred to me. I think the film also has something to say about priorities--Randy is a man who has nothing left in which he can take comfort--nothing left that he understands and no one who understands him--but his work, hence the line I quoted earlier. The same goes, I realize, for Cassidy.