The Wrestler (4 1/2 stars)
Directed by Darren Aronofsky. Written by Robert D. Siegel. With Mickey Rourke, Marisa Tomei, Evan Rachel Wood, and Mark Margolis. (R)
The Wrestler opens with the bombast of an '80s-era heavy metal anthem, a fist-pumping call to arms that plays as the camera tracks across one man's career's worth of advertisements for wresting bouts. They are the bouts of the Reagan years, when professional wrestling had begun to flower into an extravagant and cartoonish morality play that provided a career for wrestlers like Hossein Khosrow Ali Vaziri—better known an The Iron Sheik. Draped in an Iranian flag, he did battle with American counterparts with monikers like Sgt. Slaughter. It was the Cold War writ small every Saturday morning.
For Randy "The Ram" Robinson (Mickey Rourke), those were the golden years. Two decades later, he's an aging nobody, unloading delivery trucks at a local supermarket while he tries to sustain a declining career. With the coliseums gone if not forgotten, he spends his weekends traveling a circuit of dingy American Legion halls, pulling on the tights for a shrinking crowd of diehard fans. Home is a trailer, or, when he's locked out because he can't make the rent, his van. The closest thing he has to a relationship is a rapport with the aging stripper Cassidy (Marisa Tomei).
It's a living, but for Randy, it's his whole life. Rourke, who spent some time as a pro boxer, brings an easy believability to the scenes of locker room camaraderie. As they tape their elbows and lace up their boots, the wrestlers plot out their fights, deciding who will get hit with a folding chair or a sheet of glass. In one particularly brutal match, a staple gun and barbed wire are the props. And in an industry that has raised makeup to an art form, Rourke needs little help; his lumpy face is a fighter's face; his body is a wrestler's body, smooth, artificially tanned, perhaps inflated by steroids. Watching him take punishment in the ring seems the most natural thing in the world.
Those looks behind the curtain are the film's best scenes; they have a ring of truth that feels almost documentary. Randy is a living legend to the younger wrestlers, dispensing words of encouragement and bits of wisdom about the wrestling life, holding court in his underwear. It's a private brotherhood, one that deals so much in artifice that there's no need for it among themselves. His fellow wrestlers may respect him, but they're also happy to sell him a pharmacy's worth of the drugs that help him keep his physique and manage the pain that's a part of the job.
Randy's world is opened up a bit when a health crisis threatens to end his career and, maybe, his life. He reaches out to his estranged daughter Stephanie (Evan Rachel Wood), and tries to expand on his relationship with Cassidy, finding for once that he may be good at something outside the ring. Even life at the supermarket takes a turn for the better, as Randy puts his performing skills to use at the deli counter, hearing the roar of the crowd as he slices ham. (Aronofsky, whose films are often despondent things, injects The Wrestler with a welcome dose of gentle humor.)
As Cassidy, Marisa Tomei finds her best role in years, largely avoiding the clich?s that are the usual downfalls of playing a stripper. Instead, she's a working mom trying to save enough money to move to an area where her son can get into a better school. She likes Randy, but thinks he can't see how similar they are—that they both perform for a living, and that the woman he sees at the club isn't really her. Her real name is Pam; he's in love with Cassidy. Then again, Randy's real name isn't Randy.
Less successful—really the one sour note in this remarkable film—is the subplot involving Randy's daughter. Father and daughter reconnect, visit the wharf, share some laughter and a dance. Even if Randy isn't completely let off the hook, the whole affair reeks of a Hallmark Hall of Fame special, where a daughter shrieks at her dad through her running mascara, and their story begins and ends so suddenly that it feels like an afterthought instead of the central plot point it's meant to be.
But oh my, Mickey Rourke. Rourke deserves every accolade he's gotten for this incredible performance. He imbues Randy with a potent mix of naivet? and wounded hope that is both the essence of his charm and his central flaw—when things start to go badly, we see it coming well before he does, and it hurts. He inhabits the character of "The Ram" so seamlessly that it's tempting—perhaps too tempting—to read it as a parable of the actor's life. The boxing career, the surgeries, the busted-up, once-handsome face; all of it seems to have led inexorably to this, a role that has resurrected his career, won him a Golden Globe and may yet win him an Oscar. It turns out he wasn't down for the count after all.
Last Chance Harvey (2 stars)
Written and directed by Joel Hopkins. With Dustin Hoffman, Emma Thompson, Eileen Atkins, Kathy Baker, Liane Balaban, James Brolin, and Richard Schiff. (PG-13)
Last Chance Harvey is the kind of film a teenager might take his grandmother to see. A story of finding love late in life, it features some charming British landscapes and accents, Dustin Hoffman, and a wedding. It's as harmless and predictable as a painting above a suburban sofa.
Hoffman plays Harvey Shine, a musician who wanted to be a jazz pianist but ended up writing commercial jingles. He's a bit out of touch, and when he takes a trip abroad to attend his daughter's wedding, his boss, who wants to bring in some younger talent, strongly suggests he make it an extended stay.
On arriving in London, sad sack Harvey discovers that his ex-wife has rented a house for the visiting family; he's stuck alone in a downtown hotel. What's worse, his daughter has decided to shut him out of the ceremony, preferring to be given away by suave step-dad Brian (James Brolin). When a petulant Harvey tries to fly the coop, he runs into civil servant Kate Walker (Emma Thompson) in the airport bar.
It would be a bit much to say that sparks fly. Harvey is a pest, a needy and needling presence constantly hovering over Kate; inexplicably, she takes pity on him. They have lunch, they stroll along a picturesque London, and we're treated to long stretches of the pair walking and laughing as the soundtrack swells. It's boilerplate Hollywood romance, familiar from a thousand earlier films. The difference is that in most films the audience actually hopes the pair will end up together; here, one nurtures a hope that Kate will make a break for it.
Alas, it's not to be. Kate insists he attend his daughter's reception, he insists she come with him, and her fate is sealed in a dizzying dress-buying montage. How much more interesting it would have been if all of Harvey's many problems couldn't be remedied so simply—for a film that strives to make so much about the tricky world of adult love, this one is strikingly immature.
What little joy there is in watching it unfold comes from watching Thompson and, as her mother, the estimable Eileen Atkins. Maggie Walker is as alone as her daughter, abandoned by her cad of a husband and obsessed with her new neighbor, a Polish man she suspects of being a serial killer. Their growing friendship is treated as a comic aside, and that's too bad: it feels like their story would have made a much better movie.
Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com.
