The Wrestler

We just rented and watched the film The Wrestler, the 2008 movie starring Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei, for which they received Academy Award nominations for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress, respectively. If you're looking for a movie that's uplifting, inspiring, and celebrates triumph this ain't it! But as art, as a brutally honest sampling of the grime real lives are too often covered in, it is masterful. It is a story about people whose self-worth, whose identity, whose reason for being alive is tied to what they do, and the punch-in-the-gut, crushing of the soul when success flees or eludes, and there is nothing else. Whether an over-the-hill professional wrestler, a failing salesperson, an assembly line worker whose job is eliminated, or a business owner whose enterprise fails, without the foundation of family and faith they are left with nothing. It is simultaneously a story of abandoning dignity or sense of personal honor in order to make a living, and deluding ourselves that there is a wall of separation between our real lives and our money-earning life, like the film's stripper who clings to the rationalization that she's not a stripper, she's a mother. There is also the subtle message of how the personally disastrous choices we make can affect others-our children particularly. The stripper must each night leave her young son with a sitter so she can go dance, and we are allowed to infer how that reality will wound the child. Does he know? Or does she lie to him? How will their relationship and his self image "adjust" to the truth? Mickey Rourke's character has a grown daughter that he abandoned early to pursue his stardom. We witness her intense bitterness and hatred toward her father. She is living as a lesbian now, and we can infer her father's abandonment as underlying her rejection of men. There are cinematically clever parallels and juxtapositions as well. Compare, for example, the crowd's jubilant adulation of Rourke's character-The Ram-when he enters the arena to the disinterested, even insulting reception the stripper receives from her audience. Notice the parallels between The Rams "backstage" preparation for his supermarket deli-counter day job, and the prep, then walk through the curtain at a show. Notice the juxtaposition when The Ram again surrenders to the draw of the ring, just as Pam, the stripper known as Cassidy, can no longer suppress her shame and loathing for what she does. The Wrestler is depressing, and excruciatingly realistic. It raises some questions it doesn't answer, because, I suppose, some questions have no answer. But it should be seen!

jls