REVIEW: Rourke is brilliant as 'The Wrestler'

I wondered how you get from the trippy, etherial musings of "The Fountain" to a movie as grounded, yet profound, as "The Wrestler." So when I had the opportunity to chat over drinks with Darren Aronofsky at a Washington, D.C., hotel, I asked him.

"After two years of working on the special effects in ‘The Fountain,' I realized I wanted to get back to the set, get back to people. For me, it's all about the actors," he said.

"Repeating yourself almost never works. I wanted to reinvent myself and do something completely different."

And so he has.

Once upon a time, Randy Robinson (Mickey Rourke) was the greatest wrestler there ever was.

Twenty years later, those glory days have long passed, and the man once known as "The Ram" ekes out a living clashing with men half his age before a mere handful of fans.

Instead of expensive jewelry and fine clothes, Randy now sports knee and elbow braces, eyeglasses and an unwieldy hearing aid. He is, as he confesses, nothing but a "broken down piece of meat." After a heart attack fells him and doctors inform him he could die if he ever enters the ring again, the burnt-out shell of his former self takes a job at a deli, deciding to finally set his tattered life in order. He attempts to reconnect with his estranged teenage daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) and tries to woo a stripper named Cassidy (Marisa Tomei) to settle down with him.

But when the prospect of a rematch with his longtime nemesis, the Ayatollah, presents itself, Randy must weigh his mortality against his desire to hear the crowd roar his name one last time.

I've never really been a wrestling fan, a sentiment director Aronofsky told me he shares.

But he was fascinated by the fickle nature of the celebrity, and when the concept for "The Wrestler," a story he conceived of after graduating from film school, came to mind, he knew it was time to move forward with the project.

Randy and Cassidy, both beyond their professional expiration dates, make their livings as performers. However, when each simultaneously hits a crossroad, she goes one way and he another. She chooses to crawl out of the grit and muck that Aronofsky so evocatively shoots, documentary style, in a New Jersey of ever-increasing decay, while Randy has lived here so long, it would be like saying farewell to the only life he's ever known.

When "The Ram" gives his farewell speech, listen closely. The words are not Randy's so much as they are Rourke's. The actor wrote them himself. It is precisely because Rourke's own life so serendipitously parallels that of the character he plays that makes "The Wrestler" so compelling and so heart-breakingly tragic. Rourke doesn't even look like himself anymore. He is Neanderthal, a flesh and blood caricature of his former self, more akin to his prosthetically enhanced, square-jawed character in "Sin City" than an actual human being.

It's hard to emphasize how amazing Rourke's performance is. It's difficult to extol the second coming of Rourke when he never truly had a first coming. The star of "Body Heat," "Rumble Fish," "The Pope of Greenwich Village" and "Diner" was viewed as the next, great actor of his generation until he poured his fame, fortune and professional goodwill into a spiral of calamitous self-destruction. In-fighting with producers and an array of personal and legal problems contributed to Rourke's titanic flameout.

No one thought he would ever work in Hollywood again, much less stage a comeback.

But that is exactly what has happened.

THE WRESTLER

Cast: Mickey Rourke, Marisa Tomei, Evan Rachel Wood
Director: Darren Aronofsky
Playing at: Cinemark, Kimball's
Rated: R (for violence, sexuality/nudity, language and some drug use)
Running time: 1 hour, 49 minutes.

GRADE: A-