Word: wrestlers
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...anticipation sank with the opening credits: "Mickey Rourke, Marisa Tomei, Evan Rachel Wood." That list spelled out the plot: damaged veteran, middle-age girlfriend, young daughter. The Wrestler never rose above fight-movie bromides, never dispelled my gloom. The character stereotyping makes Sylvester Stallone's Rocky Balboa, by comparison, seem as swathed in moral ambiguity as Luchino Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers. The movie's serioso sentimentality is doubly strange since the script is by Robert Siegel, an ex-staffer of The Onion and co-writer of The Onion Movie. His old job was puncturing clichés; here...
...Story goes like this. Back in the '80s, Randy "The Ram" Robinson (real name: Robin Ramzinsky) was a hero-stud pro wrestler; he fought "the Ayatollah" at the top of the Garden card. But after 20 years on the downalator - his body ballooned with exercise, bloated with steroids and damaged with the death of a thousand cuts - Randy works tank towns for a few hundred bucks. He's been locked out of his Jersey trailer home for laggard payments. And to secure the fans' roving attention, his ring rivals are getting into extreme fighting; one fellow, who looks like...
...Anyone who's seen a fight film will be able to predict the rest of The Wrestler. Randy gets one more chance: a 20-year rematch in Wilmington of his Ayatollah fight. Will he pass it up to save his life? (Not if there's gonna be an Act Three.) He also has a stab at mending the hearts of the women in his life. Will Randy manage to connect with his estranged daughter (Wood), who hasn't forgiven him for abandoning her? (That's Act Two, where the only innovation is that the girl's mother is never mentioned...
...American directors whose movies upset the complacency of indie cinema. Pi, Requiem for a Dream and The Fountain were demanding and rewarding in various ways: the first wacko, the second gritty, the third sumptuously romantic, and all marvelously dense with imagery. So the big surprise in The Wrestler is that it's visually inert. Aronofsky's main camera habit is to follow Randy, just his imposing back, as he trudges through corridors toward another fight. (Martin Scorsese virtually patented that shot in Raging Bull and Goodfellas.) The trope does pay off later in the film, when the camera trails...
...Luck of the Draw when the producers refused to let him include his pet chihuahua in the movie." Instead, Rourke, who had been a serious amateur boxer as a teenager, went professional, submitting himself to the rigorous training, abuse and combat that would pay off in The Wrestler. The face he wears in the movie came from those years in the ring, plus some plastic surgery that didn't work out quite as Rourke had hoped...