The Wrestler (2008) review

     This movie is both painful and resonate for me as a professional wrestling fan. My actual review will be informed by the fact I am and involve a lot of fandom commentary on the subject. If you want to know whether you should see it, well, I point to the ridiculous amount of praise the movie has already received.

    You don't need me to tell you this movie is great.

    It's a classic performance, beautifully made, blah-blah-blah. It's not a feel-good sort of movie and is a tragedy in the Shakespearian sense of the word rather than just misery poker. The Wrestler wouldn't be nearly as effective if not for the fact our hero could move away from the inevitable train wreck at several points but chooses not to. You should probably go see this movie but I have to admit I had to stop it several times for the power of the emotion on display.

The visual homages to Macho Man Randy Savage with Randy Robinson are considerable--and heartbreaking.

    So before the rest of my review, know it's amazing, go see it, 10 out of 10, and so on.

    Nothing new there.

    Now onto my own personal thoughts.

    The premise of Randy "The Ram" Robinson, not his real name, was a famous wrestler during the 1980s. A montage of newspaper clips shows him at the height of his physical prowess doing things like performing in main event shows at Madison Square Garden. There's a lot of great references if you're familiar with wrestling, some of which may not have been intentional for the audience to get. Randy's body in the photos, for example, is Lex "The Total Package" Luger's with a younger Mickey Rourke's face placed on top of it.

    Lex Luger, for laymen, is an example of a megastar of wrestling who had the potential to go to the very top (and did by most standards) but was brought down by serious injury as well as poor life decisions. The fact he also achieved his amazing physical presence through the abuse of drugs was an open secret as well. Lex, unlike Randy, managed to turn his life around through religion but the consequences to his family as well as self were not small.

Even dressed-down, Marisa Tomei is lovely.

    Randy, like so many wrestlers, has seriously damaged his health with a combination of drugs and the injuries he's sustained in the ring. At the age of fifty-two, like Mickey Rourke, he's in apparent amazing shape but this is achieved through a massive combination of drugs as well as intense workouts.

    Bluntly, a lot of older wrestlers cannot sustain their physiques without chemicals even if it is killing them by degrees. As Mick Foley said in his commentary on the film, "I wish there had been some visible difference in Randy's physique after he underwent heart surgery and gave up 'roids—even if just to illustrate the effectiveness and necessity of those substances in "the Ram's" life."

    Despite this, the fact his fame has dwindled to a scattered handful of middle-aged fans who loved him during their childhood, and his apparent poverty (living in a trailer park he can barely afford--and only because of his job at a grocery store), Randy is actually rather happy.

The struggle for him in the ring is intense and emotional for a variety of reasons.

    Professional wrestling provides him not only with a reminder he was once world-famous but a camaraderie from his fellow wrestlers as well as a generally appreciative audience. One of the true-to-life elements from the story is Randy is treated as a master performer by the aforementioned wrestlers in much the same way Buddy Holly would be if he was still alive and traveling the indie rock circuit.

    This stops when he has his first heart attack. This occurs after a horrific hardcore wrestling match which goes well-beyond what would have permissible during the ECW's attempt to shock audiences into paying attention. This is one of the few scenes I felt which rang false, not so much because it couldn't happen but I think should have had a bit more build-up. A star of Randy's magnitude, no matter how faded, being used in those sort of brawls required a bit more explanation for me. Either
way, Randy must quit wrestling or die.

    The rest of the movie deals with Randy trying to see if he has anything in his life other than professional wrestling. He attempts to move a gentle flirtation with a local stripper, Cassidy (Marisa Tomei), into an actual relationship. He attempts to reconnect with his lesbian daughter who he ignored during her childhood. Randy also tries to transition to full-time employment at the super-market. Its notable and true-to-life Randy's failures come from the fact he tries to improve himself rather than sticking with what he knows.

    An ugly-ugly truth of society.

Evan Rachel Woods' Stephanie has a small but vital role in the story.

    Hanging over Randy's head during all this is the 20th anniversary of his main event battle with the Ayatollah (real-life wrestler Ernest Miller), a transparent stand-in for one of the most famous wrestlers of all-time in the Iron Sheik. The Iron Sheik played on the prejudices of the time (and today) but was another example of a master performer. Unlike most sports movies, there's no real triumph if Randy goes into the ring one last time, but it might be where he thinks he could achieve one last bit of glory before he dies.

    Pointless as that may be.

    Mickey Rourke's performance is amazing because he imbues Randy with an immense amount of dignity and good will. Without ever directly stating it, it seems obvious Randy was a jerkass in his younger years but has mellowed with age to become a big cuddly teddy bear. The way he bonds with children and those around him shows he should have been able to succeed at anything in his life but just hasn't.

    Marisa Tomei does an astoundingly good job as a woman put-off by Robby trying to pursue her romantically given her profession even as she understands, on some level, he's a great human being. Just a failure at life. I will say, in strictly shallow terms, I had difficulty believing a bunch of twenty-something strip club patrons refused a private show with her because she's too old. I can believe in aliens and zombies in a movie but not that.

    Heh.

The ending is powerful, moving, and yet open to interpretation--at least in my mind.

    I also loved Evan Rachel Wood's appearance as Randy's daughter, Stephanie, who is amazing in a bit role. She wants to believe in Randy but, really, has been burned by him before and her suspicions he'll fail her again are not without cause.

    The Wrestler isn't, necessarily, about wrestling. A variant about it could have been done with any profession that involves money and fame as well as how quickly those things can evaporate. Other kinds of sports and the music industry have just as many Randy Robinsons as wrestling. However, there are plenty of tragic tales like Randy. Too many people who die young or live shells of their previous life because of the profession's hazards. There's no health insurance or pension plan for wrestlers and as they say in the movie, "Wrestling is scripted but the injuries are real."

    As for the ending? I'm glad its ambiguous. In my head, I like to give him a happy ending.

    I'm just crazy like that.

10/10