After I finished watching The Wrestler on DVD last night, I switched over to the TV just in time to see Daniel Craig and some baddies kicking each other down the stairs in Casino Royale, and I couldn’t help but notice that there seemed to be something missing. The blows lacked impact. Bond could get kicked, punched, sent flying, and get straight back up again. It just didn’t feel like he was getting hurt at all.
This is the case with the vast majority of film violence, but not in The Wrestler. There is nothing glamorous or heroic about violence here. I was watching, wincing from behind my hands as Mickey Rourke’s ageing fighter Randy the Ram was beaten, slammed to the ground, cut, and even stapled with a staple gun. This film is honest about pain. You feel every blow.
Rourke is truly impressive, investing his character with a hulking power, whilst conveying a sense of exhaustion, of being a broken man. Faced with a humiliating day job, bitterness from his estranged daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) and rejection from the kind-hearted stripper he forms a bond with (Marisa Tomei), the Ram drags himself through his wrestling moves because it is all he has left. When we see him bleaching his hair and visiting a tanning salon to prepare for a fight, there is a strong sense of the fragility of his performance, the cheap tricks used to maintain it.
Perhaps The Wrestler can be read as a commentary on violence as entertainment. It certainly feels that way when we see the crowds roaring for two men, dripping with blood, slamming each other with sticks wrapped in barbed wire. But more than anything else, this is a moving account of ageing, failure, and the vulnerability of a man whose body is starting to let him down.
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