WHEN “The Wrestler” calls himself “a broken-down piece of meat,” he is being too generous. He’s what’s left of an ’80s pro-wrestling icon – markdown Rapunzel hair, a face like a tenderized orange, a voice box like a muffler being dragged down the turnpike. He lives in a trailer park in New Jersey, and not one of the nicer ones. He is played, with crumpled glory, by the ghost of Mickey Rourke.
Randy “The Ram” Robinson (ne Robin Ramzinsky) has a tale of woe as pumped with cliche as the film’s hero is with steroids. His girl is a stripper (Marisa Tomei), his daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) hates him, his home is a trailer, his ride a serial killer’s van. He’s got a bum ticker. What else? Oh, he wants to pull it all together for a big rematch with his arch rival.
Yet some voodoo of craftsmanship and purity – I can’t decide whether it’s in Robert Siegel’s original script or Darren Aronofsky’s direction – makes “The Wrestler” as irresistible as a headlock. It’s all been done a thousand times, but seldom done well. Aronofsky, previously an imagineer of aggressively weird pictures such as “Pi” and “The Fountain,” proves a master of trailer-park realism – scuffed, funny and human.
For a movie whose element is lap dances at “Cheeques” and guys named “Mr. Magnificent” and “the Funky Samoans,” “The Wrestler” is as precise with its details as a lyric poem. The fighting is brief but crucial. There are only about 12 minutes of ring action, and as shoddy as it is, it may make you see these turnbuckle clowns in a different light. How “fake” will your bruises be after you fall backwards off an 8-foot ladder onto a card table covered with barbed wire? When was the last time your pectoral muscles sustained an insult by staple gun? Compared to these guys, boxers are as soft as Camembert.
What the movie is really about is its people, the kind of citizens who affix posters of singing groups to their walls (AC/DC for Randy; Vampire Weekend for his daughter). It’s about the antediluvian video game that stars (and is still played by) the Ram, and the spectators (meaty guys in football jerseys and gold chokers, a fan with an artificial leg who begs Randy to club an opponent with it) who still attend Randy’s bouts. A slut in an animal-print jersey at a bar in Rahway wants to know if Randy likes to party – “like, a fireman party” – and the meaning turns out to be perfectly clear, if hilarious.
Randy is human hair metal, and hearing “Round and Round” in a bar with a pretty girl is as close to feeling good as he’ll ever get, a flash of life “before that Cobain p – – – y had to come along.” Another high point is a bit of random joy that comes when Randy accepts a job in a deli. Being a showman, he works the crowd: “Whatcha havin’, good-lookin’?” he says to a little mole man whom he commands to drop back to catch a touchdown pass of egg salad.
I’d call this Rourke’s Oscar scene, except the whole movie is his Oscar scene. He dances with his daughter in a deserted ballroom by the boardwalk, he winces as he slices open his own forehead in a fight, he sits at a folding table in a nearly empty room trying to sell Polaroids of himself posing with fans for eight bucks.
Rourke is a landfill of a man, as brilliantly dismal as the Bruce Springsteen song (sure to win an Oscar) that closes the film. You can’t cry because he’s too funny, and you can’t laugh because he’s too tragic. As for Tomei, her street sweetness still purrs like a Trans Am, but there is a problem with her playing a fading stripper: her body. She shows us all but about three square centimeters of it, and it’s in mint condition.
Thanks in part to a cleverly ambiguous ending that allows you to walk away in whatever mood you like, “The Wrestler” offers something to pretty much everyone in the audience. Much like “The Sopranos,” it creates a world that might make you feel utterly at home or exhilarated by strange horrors. Maybe both.
THE WRESTLER
Wins the belt.
Running time: 107 minutes.
Rated R (wrestling violence, nudity, drug abuse, profanity).
At the Lincoln Plaza, the Sunshine.