Sucker Punch

[January 14th, 2009]

The most genuinely affecting element in The Wrestler, a mushy hunk of cornpone that has become a sensation for facilitating Mickey Rourke’s professional comeback, comes after the movie is, strictly speaking, already over. It’s an ending-credits song by Bruce Springsteen—also called “The Wrestler,” it’s an acoustic guitar-and-piano dirge that could have been an outtake from Nebraska. “Have you ever seen a one-trick pony in the fields so happy and free?” the Boss growls. “If you’ve ever seen a one-trick pony then you’ve seen me.” The minor-key tune is a masterpiece of declining-years washout regret, and it’s enough to make you think, just for a moment, that you’ve seen a movie nearly as good—a genuine fuckup’s lament. Unfortunately, the lyrics also manage precisely to describe The Wrestler’s director, Darren Aronofsky.

At first forearm smash, The Wrestler may seem like a departure for Aronofsky. After making his name with the arthouse math thriller Pi, Aronofsky rapidly skated into fantastical hysteria, starting with double-penetrating dildos and chopped-off limbs in Requiem for a Dream, and winding up with The Fountain, which featured Hugh Jackman floating through time and space in a giant bubble. Now the director has apparently popped his own protective casing and emerged blinking into the gritty light of regular people’s lives. The only problem here is that Darren Aronofsky has never met any regular people.

He is, however, obviously familiar with a little movie called The Champ. A story so nice they filmed it twice (first in 1931 with Wallace Beery, and again in 1979 with Jon Voight), The Champ concerns a busted-up husk of a prizefighter, wrecked by age and booze, who barely scrapes out a living on undercards and is ready to quit, to preserve his bum ticker—until the worship of his son inspires him to climb back into the ring for one last, doomed fight. This synopsis barely hints at the shameless sentimentality of The Champ: It is the kind of schmaltz-dipped flummery that simply cannot be filmed anymore with a straight face. Which makes it all the more remarkable that Aronofsky has remade it faithfully (he even keeps the bad heart!), merely substituting pro wrestling for boxing. Well, he makes two other changes: He replaces the kid with Evan Rachel Wood as Rourke’s resentful lesbian daughter, and he changes the love interest from a horse trainer to Marisa Tomei as a stripper…with a heart of gold. The switch of settings is the most significant trade, however—it reveals that Aronofsky shares with the WWF a bottomless love for tawdry, degrading flimflam.

Maybe The Wrestler has garnered its critical laurels for its grimy, handheld New Jersey winterscapes, which imply authenticity, or for its sensationalized violence—barbed wire and a staple gun figure prominently in fights—or for Rourke’s performance as Randy “The Ram” Robinson, which has been rightly praised everywhere. (To this acclaim I can add little—Rourke is a marvel—except that the Ram’s blond dye-job and tender enthusiasm put me in mind of Dog the Bounty Hunter.) But Aronofsky’s crowd-baiting always comes muscling in. Take the way his camera lingers salaciously on Tomei’s sad stripteases, like a 12-year-old boy half-aroused, half-disgusted by sex. Or consider an extended dolly shot following Randy on his first day on the job at a supermarket deli—the camera follows him through concrete hallways, and it’s so much like the backstage of a sports arena that you’d swear you can hear the roar of the crowd. Except—oh wait—you can hear the roar of the crowd, because Aronofsky has shoved it onto the soundtrack. So that’s what Randy’s thinking. Give Aronofsky credit for his democratic spirit; he’s as patronizing to his audience as he is to his characters.

The Wrestler looks even worse opening a week after Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino, which features a similarly pushy tragic narrative but starts from the assumption that its working-class protagonists can be proud of their lives—that being poor doesn’t make them pathetic. The Wrestler feels nothing but lofty pity. “I’m an old, broken-down piece of meat,” Randy tells his daughter through tears, “and I deserve to be all alone. I just don’t want you to hate me.” For what it’s worth, Randy, I don’t hate you. I just hate the people who put those words in your mouth.