The brilliance of Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler is that he plays an '80s pro wrestling star, Randy "the Ram" Robinson, a celebrity big enough to earn his own plastic action figure, as if he were a flesh-and-blood action figure. He's a shallow guy with a sense of humor and a heart. He's any overgrown boy's best friend. He's a buddy for all fellow grapplers who follow the sport's elusive rules. He's a playmate for any neighbor kids in his trailer park who can still get a kick out of seeing the Ram's avatar fight in fading first-generation video games.
With a profile battered in real life from his own boxing career, and a body he sculpted to rugged new proportions, Rourke wears the part of Randy the Ram with becoming lightness. When Randy enters a strip club and belligerently protects Marisa Tomei's lap-dancing stripper, Cassidy, from insult, the wary rapport of these two sensational performers suggests grungy romantic comedy.
That's not what the film turns out to be. Darren Aronofsky, who directed, and Robert D. Siegel, who wrote the script, put him at the center of a drama predetermined for a downward slide. This movie has an aura of forced tragedy, like a fourth-generation version of Requiem for a Heavyweight. The filmmakers focus on Randy's inability to do anything else with his life after his stardom wanes. The drama proves more mournful and leveling than it needs to be.
Some movies about losers, such as Leaving Las Vegas, generate dizzying blends of comedy and drama as their heroes go into death spirals and reveal untapped depths of warped creativity or curdled sensitivity. The Ram simply realizes his limits and makes all the obvious wrong moves.
Aronofsky brings us right into the ring with wrestlers trying to please promoters and maintain their fan base by enduring ever more baroque and painful beatings, gougings and stabbings. It's fascinating, at first, to see Rourke in businesslike fashion meet the needs of his job, trading moves beforehand with his match-mates, procuring the requisite drugs to keep him properly pain-free and juiced. And Aronofsky cannily depicts the Ram's troubled truce with lower-middle-class life. Aronofsky doesn't overdo the Ram's continuing fight with his landlord, who can't time a rent schedule to the wrestler's fight schedule, or some sour comedy with a supermarket manager, who gives the Ram part-time work on the loading dock.
