The Wrestler

Darren Aronofsky, 2008

Note: at some point this review sort of took on a life of its own and I began to talk about a lot of things I hadn’t intended to. As such, it’s littered with spoilers. If you haven’t see the movie and want to, you probably shouldn’t read this, at least not the last few paragraphs.

I can’t tell you why I didn’t see this movie earlier. To be fair, I’m not really a fan of Aronofsky. I couldn’t wait to see his previous picture, The Fountain, but was badly disappointed by it. Also, while parts of this movie seem right up my alley (particularly Marisa Tomei as a stripper), there was something about it that seemed like it could well kind of suck. And, really, that’s the attitude I’ve had about a lot of the supposedly “great” movies that came out this year. The Reader, Milk, Revolutionary Road, Doubt, and others, some of which I’ll talk about later, all felt like they were just going to lay there. Sure, I figured they’d be good movies, but there was nothing in the trailers or plots even to make me care too much. Still, I held out hope for The Wrestler and headed over to the Coon Rapids Karasotes to see the picture after work this past Friday.

As soon as the opening credits started, I knew I was in there presence of greatness. As the names, framed in stark white, appear on the screen, the camera moves over a disorganized pile of posters and press clippings, all detailing a fictional ‘80s rivalry between Randy “The Ram” Robinson and The Ayatola. I was hooked. From there, we catch up with the Ram in the modern day. He’s washed up now, a has been who spends his weekends autographing Polaroids or fighting matches with men half his age at the local VFW. During the week, he whiles away the days hauling boxes around the back rooms of a local grocery and hanging out at a strip club, getting lap dances from Marisa Tomei who, it has to be said, looks amazing.

During a particularly brutal match, the Ram endures everything from barbwire ripping open his flesh to meeting the business end of a staple gun. After, he collapses in the locker room, the victim of a heart attack. The doctors tell him that his career is over. If he wrestles again, he will die.

It is no mistake that the film is called The Wrestler. That is, at the end of the day, precisely what the Ram is, in the most iconic terms. The Wrestler is who he is; it is all he knows how to be. Still, if the Ram knows anything, it’s how to fight and fight he does, putting up a valiant effort to try and shed the twenty years of ever diminishing fame in favor of a new life. He reaches out to Marisa Tomei, the only woman with whom he has any sort of romantic relationship or even relationship at all. At first, we fear that the Ram is deluding himself with her. She is, after all, a stripper and he is, after all, her client. Yet, that relationship serves to unite them much more than we might suspect. Tomei’s stripper is ultimately facing the same twilight as the Ram. Her entire career is based on the use of her body as a tool. She is the subject of look and fantasy, but as she grows older, that body is failing her. Her clientele is clearly diminishing, just as the Ram’s is. Just as fewer and fewer fans want to see the exploits of an aged wrestler, fewer and fewer johns want lap dances from the aging stripper.

The Ram and Marisa begin a relationship in earnest, he constantly convinced of its viability, she keeping him always at arm’s length, unwilling perhaps to admit to the truths of her own life that a relationship with the Ram might represent, namely that something good could come from her demeaning profession or, worse yet, that she and this tarnished idol are more alike than she ever knew. The Ram simultaneously attempts to take a job at the meat counter of the grocery store and to reconnect with his long estranged daughter.

For a moment, it looks like it all might work. Marisa begins to open up, the Ram and his daughter spend a touching afternoon together as he confesses that all he wants is for her to not hate him. Even the job at the deli counter seems like it might work out, despite the fact that the manager has printed his real name, Robin, on his name badge.

Robin, in fact, is who the Ram is trying to be, just as Marisa Tomei’s stripper, who’s stage name is Cassidy, realizes she wants to be Pam (her real name). But while, Cassidy is just a face Pam puts on, the Ram is the Ram. He is the wrestler and there is no escaping it. It hardly takes long at all for the fragile reality the Ram has constructed in his earnest attempt to be Robin to fall apart completely. A night of hard drinking and sex makes him late for a dinner with his daughter, irreparably damaging their still tender new relationship by reinforcing her image of her father as a man who is never there. Pam keeps him at arms length, leading to a fight at the strip club, and the tedium of the deli counter begins to take its toll.

It is while dealing with an increasingly impatient group of customers that one recognizes Robin as the Ram. Like Saint Peter, the Ram tries to deny it, but the man’s persistence get’s the better of him and in a scene echoing an earlier moment in the ring where the Ram cuts himself with a razor blade to produce some blood for the crowd, the Ram cuts himself on the meat slicer and quits in a fury, blood gushing from his hand.

One might argue that this is not irreparable. As we see in a few intercut scenes, Pam really does care for the Ram and is coming around. Perhaps he can still patch up things with his daughter. Maybe he can get another job.

Contemplating these possibilities, I find myself thinking of two other films. The first is Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby, where in Hillary Swank’s female boxer suddenly finds herself completely paralyzed, parts of her body suddenly amputated in the night when infections begin to set in. She is a woman whose entire being is based on physicality, on being a boxer. With that denied her, her existence is no longer bearable and she begs Clint Eastwood’s character to euthanize her, an act which cannot be seen as anything but passion and release, particularly once the doctors begin to keep her constantly sedated to prevent her from trying to kill herself by doing things like biting through her tongue. The other movie I find myself thinking of is The Incredibles. There’s this amazing scene in that movie where Mr. Incredible and his family is trapped by the film’s villain. Not long before he was convinced that his family was killed and he confesses that he cannot break out of their trap because he is not strong enough. He doesn’t mean strong enough, physically though. He is not strong enough to risk losing his family again.

This is the image of the Ram I have in these final scenes. Number one: he is the wrestler. He is not Robin and he has been denied his very being. He is literally incapable of being Robin. He doesn’t know how. True, he could keep trying again and again to be that man, but he simply isn’t strong enough for the continued failure. This tower of a man who beat back man after man in the ring, cannot bear to look in his daughter’s eyes and hear her say she doesn’t love him ever again. He isn’t strong enough.

And so, the Ram heads for the biggest wrestling match of the film, a much publicized re-match between himself and The Ayatola, now a used car salesman. There is no mistaking it, though, as the Ram leaves his trailer park home one last time, it is on a suicide mission. Even if, by some miracle he doesn’t die at this match, he will keep wrestling until he does. He doesn’t know how to do anything else.

As the match is about to begin, Pam arrives to talk him out of it. She does care for him, she says, she’s there for him, offering him a reason to step back from the ledge, but the Ram’s mind is made up. He steps into the ring and begins the match. It’s not long before his opponent realizes that the Ram isn’t well. He’s sluggish, having trouble getting up off the matt. He is dying. The Ayatola offers him an easy way out. He will let the Ram win. All he has to do is end it. The Ram looks back to the back stage entrance, but Pam is gone. In that crucial moment, his mind is made up. The Ram climbs the turnbuckle, his legs shaky as he prepares to inflict his trademark body slam on his opponent. He basks in the roar of the crowd for a final brief moment, jumps, and dies.

Australia

Baz Luhrmann, 2008

Quite simply, Baz Luhrmann’s Australia is the sort of movie they just don’t make anymore and not exactly the film I expected from Luhrmann. Whereas Moulin Rouge, Luhrmann’s previous picture and a personal favorite, was a postmodern masterpiece of the likes of which we hadn’t seen before, Australia is, in many way, precisely and specifically something we’ve seen before. That is not to say the film isn’t good or, indeed, not postmodern. In truth, it’s both of those, but it is also a very different movie from Moulin Rouge. Audiences who were shocked or confused by the frantic energy of Moulin Rouge will enjoy the slower pace and familiar plot of Australia.

Australia, you see, is a cattle drive epic that has much more in common with sprawling American westerns than anything else. Nicole Kidman is Lady Sarah Ashley, a member of the British upper crust who has journeyed to 1940s Australia to assist her husband in selling a failing cattle ranch set up amidst Australia’s Outback. When she arrives, however, she finds her husband already dead, murdered by a nefarious cattle hand who has been rustling Nicole’s cattle to a rival ranch. Of course, Nicole decides to take on a cross country cattle drive herself, recruiting a ragtag team that includes an Aboriginal woman, a young, half-caste Aboriginal boy, a drunk bookkeeper, and the Drover. The Drover is the ruggedly handsome, rough around the edges loner played by Hugh Jackman. A sort of freelance cattle driver, the Drover is the sort of character that’s right at home in American westerns (to be fair, there’s more than a little of the Australian ocker character – Crocodile Dundee is a popular if a bit imperfect example – to the Drover as well and the two concepts are not mutually exclusive, but I’ve hardly the time to get into that here and now). Of course, he and Nicole hate each other at first, but soon find themselves in each other’s arms. The film follows the cattle drive through the gorgeous scenery of the Outback before segueing into a second act that’s more about Hugh and Nicole’s romance and a third act set amidst a Japanese attack on Australia in the weeks following Pearl Harbor.

The familiar ground of the plot does not hinder the film, though. Indeed, it is, in many ways, an asset. For one the familiar plot, gives the viewer ample time to admire the gorgeous scenery (which, of course, includes the always ravishing Ms. Kidman). It isn’t a worn out plot, either, meaning that there are still plenty of thrilling and heartbreaking moments, like in the stampede about a third of the way into the film. Further, while familiar, this really is the sort of thing we just don’t see on the screen anymore, which, ironically, makes the film stand out as something unique amongst the other new releases. It is a step back in time, not just in the setting, but in the filmmaking as well.

One last thing: it is easy to think of Australia as a picturesque movie that casts it’s world as a sort of paradise and, indeed, the film does do that in part, but that doesn’t mean that it shies away from the darker aspects of the time. In the 1940s, Australia was engaged in a practice that led to what has become known as “the stolen generation.” The stolen generation is a regular subject in such Australian films as Rabbit-Proof Fence but which remains relatively unknown to Americans. At that time in Australia, it was common practice for the government to forcibly remove half-white/half-black Aboriginal children from their mothers, many of whom were the victims of rape. These children were then sent to a mission island off the Australian coast where they were raised by the church with the express purpose of “breeding the black out of them,” by denying them any link to their rich Aboriginal heritage. The stolen generation, then, is just that: an entire generation of children stolen by the government from their parents and their culture. This tragedy is examined through the character of Nullah, the half-caste boy who lives on Nicole’s ranch and whom she eventually comes to think of as her own child. This sets up for some nice drama in the third act as the film’s villain (the cattle rustler from earlier) threatens to send Nullah, in truth his own bastard son, to the mission island. Of course, Nicole is horrified both by the prospect of losing the boy and of the general practice, even though she herself has tried to keep Nullah from indulging in his heritage by going on walkabout with his Aboriginal grandfather (played by the seemingly ever-present Aboriginal actor David Gulpilil of Crocodile Dundee, Rabbit-Proof Fence, and The Last Wave fame).

Ultimately, while not as stunningly original as Moulin Rouge, Australia is a really solid, entertaining picture that really stands out from the regular box office fare of today. It’s a trip back to a different time that’s well worth taking, particularly if you long for the cattle driving epics of yesteryear. Three stars.