The Wrestler
Barton Fink is one of the Coen Brothers' more obscure films. In it, John Turturro plays a playwright who moves to Hollywood to write movies, and the first film he is assigned is a 'B' wrestling movie. Acclaimed in the theater for his ability to capture the plight of the working man, Barton struggles to infuse that same gritty humanity into his script while fighting feelings of shame as a sellout.
Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler is the wrestling picture Barton Fink was trying to write: a cinema veritè of the ring.
Mickey Rourke's promising career in the 1980s was derailed by a lot of self-defeating bad boy behavior, so the brief rebirth of his career with the character of Randy "The Ram" Robinson seems only fitting. Rourke even took up a pro boxing career in the early 1990s when acting roles dried up, and his life is a testament to the fleeting nature of fame, giving him immediate insight into the plight of The Ram. It's the performance of a lifetime; the acting equivalent of comeback player of the year.
After suffering a heart attack, even Randy is keen enough to see the writing on the wall. The independent pro circuit he still wrestles on is full of young up-and-comers eager to get their big break in the WWE or wherever big-time pro wrestling is these days, while Ram is a washed up middle-aged star still doing the only thing he knows how to do well. But given his health and financial circumstances, he knows retirement is his best option to get his life in order as best he can by looking to the future. That starts with repairing a broken relationship with his estranged daughter and starting a new friendship and possible romance with a stripper who is getting a little long in the tooth for her profession as well.
Robert D. Siegel's script never gets more complicated than its characters, and neither does Aronofsky's direction for that matter. Both are keenly aware of the intellectual limits possessed by the protagonist and his would-be girlfriend, and they aren't about to make them appear to be ridiculously smarter than they are just for the sake of making clever points about not being able to give up the ghost. These people are who they are—no more, no less—driven by the same shortcomings as the rest of us, even if they aren't analytical enough to realize why. That's the audience's job.
Randy Robinson's job is wrestling. In all its glory, real and imagined, he feeds off it like a drug; and like the drugs he pumps into his aging body to keep it going, it has had a diliterious effect on his relationships and his life, and it's nearly impossible to give up. Though we only know him from the lowest lows of his life, we get a strong sense of what the highest highs must have been like, too. Does it make the lonliness and isolation he feels worth while?
Aronofsky, no stranger to presenting life's most depressing gutters (see Requiem for a Dream), could have made this sad sack's story a murky tome about the pathetic fallacy of eternal glory. Instead he never loses compassion for a loveable loser whose young life of excess led to a mid-life of decay and remorse. Whether it's best to quit while you're ahead or never too late to go out on top, The Wrestler makes no apologies for its flawed hero. After all, The Ram can't be pinned down that easily.