Body Heat

A dinged-up Mickey Rourke looks for one more shot in Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler.

by Cindy Fuchs

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Your first glimpses of Randy "The Ram" Robinson (Mickey Rourke) are looking back. Specifically, they are tacked to a wall — newspaper clippings, photos and fliers, remnants of a professional wrestling career, yellowing. As the camera pans over this wall, the soundtrack offers up another sort of reminder, a crowd's cheers and boos, rants and hype, Quiet Riot's "Metal Health." The date is 1989.

WRESTLEMANIA: Randy "The Ram" Robinson (Mickey Rourke) is a once-famous fighter hoping for one last shot in The Wrestler.

Cut to "20 years later," when Randy's slumped in a classroom chair, coughing as if dying, surrounded by used toys and crayon drawings. The camera approaches slowly and low, as if expecting trouble, while a kid in jeans enters the frame, crumpled bills in hand. Sorry, man, he apologizes, "I thought the gate would be bigger." Of course the gate is small: The show's been set up at an elementary school. Randy's gone where the has-beens linger, hanging onto the past in hopes of recovery, or at least, not disappearing. He gathers himself, the camera watching from over his shoulder as he shuffles through the gymnasium, nodding to autograph seekers, then drives his beater car home — a trailer now padlocked because he hasn't made rent.

These first moments reveal in poignant, deft strokes the film's point of departure: Randy's time is wearing down, along with his body — which he keeps toned, tanned and topped by a signature, now thinning, blond mane. Still, he resists the end of his story, encouraged by his friends in the business, low-rent as they are, to look ahead. In particular, a skeezy promoter has set up a rematch between Randy the Ram and the Ayatollah (aka Bob, played by Ernest "The Cat" Miller), revisiting not only their own memories, but also that historical moment when the U.S. battled scary clerics with fierce and righteous impunity. Though it feels almost unbearably intimate at times, The Wrestler manages such grand allusions adroitly, its tight frames and handheld herky-jerkiness emblematic of one life collapsing in on itself as well as the end of an era, when U.S. cowboys ran roughshod across the globe. 

Randy's current day job resonates, as well, stacking shelves at a suburban New Jersey warehouse store. Enduring disdain from his nerdish boss, Randy's vaguely replenished on the weekends by his stints in the ring — even more so by the locker room camaraderie, the guys eager to repeat what he's already done.

It's this investment in storytelling that the film finds most fascinating. Professional wrestling is at once work, sport and entertainment, fake and real, a show with consequences, in which each player's part moves the good-and-evil plot. A story might be overarching (across matches and locations and even years) or self-contained, a contest starting and ending with roles fixed and finished. Repeatedly, the wrestler's body is the site of moral and political drama, the locus of fan love or hate, a screen for the projection of (mostly working class, mostly white and often male) desires. Randy yearns for that connection with his audience, the roar he felt he earned — whether as villain or hero. He depends on his fans, calls them his "family." After a heart attack, he's told to give up the ring, but his day job depletes him, reminds him of his mortality. He works extra hours at the warehouse store butcher's counter, a man who's made his name performing as a kind of meat, with a series of stunts involving bloody stapling and cutting and slamming all too visible here, now slicing it for aging ladies.

Grieving his lost self, Randy seeks redemption, one last storyline familiar from the ring. Frightened by the heart attack, he looks up his daughter Stephanie (Evan Rachel Wood), but she's still seething that he abandoned her as a child. Though she provides a few moments of melodrama as Randy seeks her forgiveness, the film is less interested in Stephanie than in her father's strangely genuine and painfully blubbery efforts to explain himself to her, to make sense of his innumerable bad choices. He has better luck sharing stories with a local pole dancer, Cassidy (Marisa Tomei). She's also losing time, and the parallels between their professions are hard to miss. Exposing their bodies nightly, they are subjected to cruelty and contempt by their consumers, paying customers who can't imagine the costs of such performance, such neediness and such loss. As Randy makes a few more mistakes, seeks still more forgiveness, The Wrestler doesn't judge him, but instead grants him time.

(c_fuchs@citypaper.net)

The Wrestler | Directed by Darren Aronofsky | A Fox Searchlight Pictures release | Opens Friday at the Ritz at the Bourse