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.