Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler opens on a man who has already lost. Randy “The Ram” Robinson, played by Mickey Rourke, once filled arenas in the 1980s. By the time the film finds him, he is wrestling weekends for independent promotions in New Jersey, living in a trailer park, and working part-time at a supermarket deli counter. His manager Wayne keeps needling him about his past. The film runs 109 minutes. It is a drama, and a romance, and it earns both labels.
Trailer, via SearchlightPictures.
Randy Ramzinski and the Deli Counter
Robert Siegel wrote the screenplay. What he built is a study of a body in decline. Randy takes anabolic steroid injections to keep training. After a hardcore match, he suffers a heart attack backstage and undergoes coronary artery bypass surgery. His doctor tells him to stop the steroids and stop wrestling — his heart can no longer handle the exertion. Randy retires. He takes a full-time shift at the deli counter.
That stretch is the film’s quietest and its most brutal. Rourke does not play the deli as comedy or as humiliation set piece. He plays it as a man doing a job he does not understand, in a place that does not want him.
Cassidy at Cheeques
Randy is a regular at a strip club called Cheeques, where he befriends a stripper named Pam, known on stage as Cassidy. Marisa Tomei plays her. Cassidy has a 9-year-old son named Jameson, a fact she discloses while helping Randy buy a gift. She turns down his attempts at romance because her job forbids affairs with customers.
Tomei’s Cassidy is the film’s second engine. She is not a reward waiting for Randy at the end of his arc. She is a working woman with her own rules, and she holds them.
Stephanie Ramzinski and the Gift
Cassidy pushes Randy to rebuild his relationship with his estranged daughter Stephanie, played by Evan Rachel Wood. Randy abandoned her when she was a child. He visits her residence and she rebuffs him — he was not there to raise her. Later he returns with the present he bought and apologizes for leaving her and her mother to chase his own career. The two reconnect over a visit.
The reconciliation works because the film does not oversell it. Stephanie does not forgive him because he deserves it. She forgives him because he showed up twice.
The Ayatollah Rematch
After a local win, Randy agrees to a 20th-anniversary rematch with his most notable opponent, “The Ayatollah,” played by Ernest Miller. He treats it as a possible return to stardom. He trains harder. The film’s title tells you where this goes.
The supporting cast is deep and unsentimental: Mark Margolis as Lenny, Todd Barry as Wayne, Judah Friedlander as Scott Brumberg, Wass Stevens as Nick Volpe. A long list of real professional wrestlers appears in the film, including Necro Butcher, Jay Lethal, Austin Aries, Claudio Castagnoli, Nigel McGuinness and Ron Killings. Their presence gives the ring scenes a texture no casting director could fake.
What the Comeback Costs
The Wrestler premiered at the 65th Venice International Film Festival on September 5, 2008, and won the Golden Lion there. Fox Searchlight released it on December 17, 2008. It grossed $44.7 million against a $6 million budget. Rourke won a Golden Globe, a British Academy Film Award and an Independent Spirit Award, and was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actor. Tomei was nominated for Best Supporting Actress.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| September 5, 2008 | Premiere, 65th Venice International Film Festival |
| December 17, 2008 | Theatrical release, Fox Searchlight Pictures |
The tagline is “Love. Pain. Glory.” Two of those three are honest.
What matters here is not the comeback match. It is the doctor’s instruction Randy cannot obey and the daughter he can barely reach. The film’s real subject is a man who has one thing he is good at and no life outside it. Aronofsky never lets the camera look away from the cost.
The success of The Wrestler revitalized Rourke’s career. That is a fact about the industry, not about the film. The film itself is a 109-minute argument that the body keeps a receipt for everything. It is the best thing Aronofsky had made to that point, and Rourke’s performance is the reason — a man playing a man who has run out of road and keeps walking anyway.
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