A Movie Nearly Every Night: The Wrestler

The Wrestler (2008)
Dir: Darren Aronofsky
Starring: Mickey Rourke, Marisa Tomei, Evan Rachel Wood

The Ram vs. The Ayatollah -- Sunday SUNDAY Sunday

Photo courtesy of Fox/Searchlight Pictures

Mom and I used to go to a little library book sale in Lake Arrowhead every Labor Day. I'd mill around the fiction tables in the S section (Stevenson, Stendahl, Sterne...) and listen to housewives paw through the rainbow-colored Danielle Steele books trying to remember which ones they'd read: "The story sounds familiar, but I don't know..." They'd flip through the pages and it would all look like something they'd seen before, but they just weren't sure.

That's how I felt watching The Wrestler. It all happens just the way you'd expect it to happen, to the point where I really thought I might have seen it before: he's not going to do that -- hmpf, yeah, I guess he is. Marisa Tomei manages to take it out off the broken record whenever she's in it, like she knows that her character is cliched, but she's going to do it one better. She's interesting. Not so lucky Evan Rachel Wood who plays the Ram's hysterical dramatic daughter. One minute soft - one minute crying and yelling - the torture of being the neglected child ... yah yah yah.

But, it's true, Mickey Rourke is amazing. He looks like hell, but there's a good actor in there somewhere, and he plays it the way he's supposed to play it, but he makes you want to break into him a little bit more. He's not an asshole and he's not a good guy. I liked him.

I used to think Mickey was hot in the Diner days. You get to see his a** in this, and, actually, it was a little troubling. Then he put a needle in it. This is now one of those movie images, like Warren Oates having a towel fight with Ernest Borgnine in a steam room in The Wild Bunch, that I will never get out of my head.

Thanks. Thanks a lot.