The Wrestler: Mickey Rourke’s Comeback

It’s all anyone’s been talking about at the two big film festivals: Venice, which ended today, and Toronto, which began Thursday. One group of critics has seen The Wrestler, the other is waiting, tongues out like famished dogs, for tomorrow evening’s North American premiere. The movie’s producers have withheld U.S. rights until after the film shows here, anticipating a festival furor. On Saturday, the movie won the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival — the event’s top honor. Already, the two Hollywood trade papers have raved about the movie’s star performance, and the Los Angeles Times headlines the question: “Will The Wrestler get hold of an Oscar for Mickey Rourke?”

My guess: maybe, since Rourke gives not only the kind of performance that Hollywood, the critics and some of the public think burrows into the very essence of acting. He made himself nearly unrecognizable — put on maybe 50 pounds, studded his face and body with the scars of war — to play a has-been fighter hoping for a last shot at the big time. It’s the kind of punishment that won kudos for Lon Chaney and Paul Muni in the old days, and helped Robert De Niro to an Oscar in Raging Bull playing Jake LaMotta. (He got himself into fighting shape, then he gained a ton of weight! Acting!) Beyond the stunt aspect, Rourke does strong, sensitive work. All praise to him, and to Darren Aronofsky for casting the actor and directing him to turn a standard fiction into quirky, coherent behavior.

But the movie itself is pretty bad.

My own 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 disspelled my gloom. The character stereotyping makes Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky Balboa, by comparison, seem as swathed in moral twlight 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 cliches; here he recycles them.

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” top of the card at the Garden. 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 an angry Ozark farmer, asks Randy if, during their bout, he can use a staple gun on his chest and back. That episode triggers a heart attack, and Randy is told never to wrestle again.

Anyone who’s seen a boxing 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.) And the woman 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). And will a local stripper, well played by Tomei, respond to his plaintive love and drive down to see what may be Randy’s last fight? (Can’t have a fight movie without a “Yo, Adrian!” moment.)

Aronofsky has been one of the few American directors whose movies upset the complacent status quo. Pi, Requiem for a Dream and The Fountain were demanding and rewarding in various ways: the first whacko, the second gritty, the third sumptuously romantic, and all marvelously dense with imagery. The Wrestler is the first Aronofsky film to be visually inert. His 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 Randy, briefly retired, winds up behind a deli counter. That’s a deft touch, as is the easy camaraderie Randy shares with the other veteran showmen. But Aronofsky’s main contribution was to lion-tame a jolting performance out of a forgotten hero.

I speak as one who invested early in Rourke futures. Reviewing Barry Levinson’s 1982 buddy comedy Diner, I wrote that “the prize in this gallery is Mickey Rourke, who made a strong impression in Body Heat and assumes command of Diner whenever he is onscreen. With a face as handsome as it is streetwise, and a smile that manages to be both shy and cunning, Rourke has the potential of a young Jack Nicholson.”

Soon he started making good on my bet. Within a few years, Rourke had won starring roles in a bunch of fascinating weirdies: Francis Coppola’s Rumble Fish (Mickey was Motorcycle Boy), The Pope of Greenwich Village, Michael Cimino’s Year of the Dragon, the S-M erotic drama Nine 1/2 Weeks (with Kim Basinger, who also made a comeback at Venice in The Burning Plain), the satanic thriller Angel Heart (De Niro was the Devil), as a gangster in Elephant Man makeup in Johnny Handsome and a lowlife genius in a film of Charles Bukowski’s Barfly directed by Barbet Schroeder (who also had a film at Venice; the Lido was one big Rourke reunion). The guy was sexy, dangerous, adventurous in his choice of roles. The actor’s cliche “totally committed to the process” could have been coined for Rourke.

But that was the ’80s, when directors still wanted to hire him. He pissed away what should have been his prime by curling inside the legend of the Difficult Star, acquiring an odor as rowdy and unreliable. And since he wasn’t a box office magnet, why take the chance? Bio stats on the Internet Movie Database synopsize Rourke’s 90s: “Turned down Bruce Willis’ role in Pulp Fiction … Filmed a role in [Terrence Malick’s] The Thin Red Line, that eventually got cut…. Walked off the set of 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.

This decade he did a swell turn, again under a ton of makeup, as a vengeful ex-con in the Robert Rodriguez-Frank Miller Sin City. On his few forays into late-night talk (one visit with David Letterman sticks in my mind), the host would breathe a sigh of relief to find Rourke roguishly charming; the bull hadn’t demolished the china. But mostly his rep kept him MIA. When he came up for the role of Randy, he recalled in Venice, Aronofsky told him: “You’re a really great actor, and you’ve just f–ked up your career for 15 years and nobody wants to hire you.”

I’ve written a lot lately about how the big action pictures have not just more bang for the buck but a higher movie intelligence than a lot of the highly praised indie films. The techies are the auteurs now, and they can make the most fantastic creature look and feel real. Well, Rourke here is his own special effect monster, his own Incredible Hulk. (It’s the rare movie where the closing credits for Makeup and Mr. Rourke’s Trainer are well deserved.) Reviewers love watching actors abuse their bodies for their art almost as much as actors love doing it. That’s one reason Mickey should be a guest of honor at the year-end critics’ awards dinners. Another is that Rourke’s bio blends with the story of The Wrestler, but with a happier ending. His career has come back from the dead; any award would be like a posthumous prize to someone who is, miraculously, still around to accept it.

The real cause for celebration is that he alchemizes the dross of the script into a character with a palpable physicality and inner life. Behind the bulk of his hulk, a man’s dogged decency is on display, and so, briefly, is Rourke’s fallen-angel smile. In the scene that could cinch his Oscar nomination, he gets a long closeup as Randy pours out his clumsy love for his daughter. The speech is boilerplate sentiment, which the actor elevates to a passion as sweet as it is forlorn. If Rourke had to punish himself to look the part of a battered fighter so he could slip inside Randy’s wounded innocence, then, man, it was worth it.

So even someone like me, who knows in his bones that The Wrestler is bogus, can cheer the return of Mickey Rourke. And not because it’s nice that he seems to have turned his life around and focused again on doing what he once did so well, but because the best writers and directors might have to put Rourke on the short list of actors up for great roles. The man from the past has a future again. (See photos of the Venice Film Festival here.)