If I gave my reviews subtitles, this one would be called "Darren Aronofsky Grows Up."The Wrestler is a strange movie to watch because it's almost the reverse of what the trailer suggests. That's not a bad thing, and it's not that the trailer is misleading, exactly. If anything, the trailer only gives you half the story. It's not about a man with a crappy life who gets a shot at a second chance professionally. It's about a man with a crappy life who gets a shot at a second chance professionally and a shot at a second chance personally and has to choose between them.
A lot has been made of this movie as the resurrection of Mickey Rourke, who plays the eponymous character, and it should be. No person seems more ideally suited to the story of a man who abused his body and fell spectacularly from the limelight. As Randy "The Ram" Robinson, Rourke makes the combination of contrition and obliviousness particularly devastating. It's hard to put yourself on the right track when you have no idea what that track looks like.
More importantly, thanks to a fantastic -- though occasionally too on the nose -- script from Robert D. Seigel, this movie is really the resurrection of Aronofsky. Or, rather, the renaissance of Aronofsky as a director. His previous movies hold little rewatch value for one reason or another, but in this case he manages to sidestep his tendency toward vagueness in the search for meaning and instead focuses on his characters to drive the drama. Working for the first time with cinematographer Maryse Alberti, Aronofsky abandons tricky camera work for quiet details that dot Randy's wrestling gigs across Jersey, the strip club with the dancer Randy's sweet on (Marisa Tomei), and his college aged daughter's home (Evan Rachel Wood). His sense of place is more present than ever before, and it gives the story a gritty reality that hits home nearly every time. A
Oh, and Bruce Springsteen? Was robbed.
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