It was an unoriginal story with moments that made it worth more than the story itself. It was also shot in the style of dogme 95, but without the dogme 95 code of honor.
It was not just another Rocky. The Wrestler is not necessarily about a man proving himself, but a broken man trying to find his role in life after all his success. I suppose the Rocky sequels tryed to handle this storyline, but for somee reason I found The Wrestler more effective. This is also the only ficticious movie that focuses on the lives of professional wrestlers, so no, this is not just another Rocky.
Not a great film. “It exists because it must exist.” But let’s not spend too long talking about Aronofsky. When Aronofsky pitched it to Rourke, the whole idea was that it would be his oscar-baby-comeback. Of all the institutions to pander to! Weak! I was perfectly fine with Penn’s win for Milk over Rourke’s Ram. I see The Wrestler as nothing more than an exercise for Aronofsky. “Yes, I can do this kind of film.” And it was fine. But why watch it twice?
I have seen “The Wrestler” twice, and I can say that it’s no “Rocky”. It’s almost a little trite to assume that any movie depicting a sport that involves a ring is like “Rocky”, because that’s about the only point of similarity.
Nor do I care if Aranofsky and Rourke were Oscar grubbing. It’s still a damn fine movie that (in a loose way) examines the limitations that our bodies place on us. Both “Ran” and “Cassie” are facing the same fundamental problem – what do I do with my life now that my body is betraying me? To build a whole career on the fact that your body will function in a very particular manner, but eventually break down, is a strange thing. Is it deep? Maybe, maybe not. I don’t really think that’s the point. The point is that Aranofsky did succeed at making this type of picture. Small, character driven, forceful, full of period detail (even though it takes place today), and affecting. Yes, there are cliched moments here and there, but nothing so big as to destroy the movie.
I loved the film. The images have stayed with me to this day. Rourke’s acting is heartfelt, and his emotional distress is both human and realistic. Evan Rachel Wood’s performance is spectacular. I can’t wait to see her in Woody Allen’s upcoming film. I must say, I connected more deeply with Randy the Ram than with Slumdog’s protagonist and thought the overall film was ten times better than Boyle’s. The theme of mental, emotional, and physical self-flagellation in film is not new (Raging Bull), but Rourke brings a new approach to the theme, allowing his sorrowful eyes and pained facial expressions to cut into the heart of the viewer as sharply as the razor blade with which he cuts his forehead. With time, I believe this film (and Rourke’s acting in it) will go down as one of the best.
So no, this is not another Rocky. Not even in the same league.
There probably won’t be five sequels to The Wrestler.
Wrestler is no different than any other simplistic,sugary and amazingly predictable sport story,only it’s a cover-up so that Aronofsky can present us his “talent”..
c’mon,it’s obvious that Rourke has played in better roles and Aronofsky needs to stay away from Hollywood and get back to his Pi days…
sure it’s not like Rocky but when Rocky was first shown,it was meant to be another prismatic picture about “emotion” and “struggle”…in the end,it got too much of a publicity because as usual,Oscars are more famous to the fuckin’ public..
better than Rocky?no way(but even Rocky is corny as hell),better than Rocky sequels,yes to that…
and mentioning Ran in the same league as Wrestler is an insult to a definitely superior director..
I loved the film and I’m surprised that nobody appears to have mentioned anything about the character as being a metaphor for the United States. To me, Randy faces a lot of issues that are ones which the United States was facing (and maybe still is) at the time of the film. It’s not a perfect fit but Randy’s meditation on his own life, his struggles, how is far away from what he once was, his isolation, primarily good-hearted but seemingly failing to do the right thing too many times, the willingness to repeat the same mistakes are all discussion points about America today. For me it’s a much deeper film than just an end-of-the-road wrestler.
@Mike: If I am not mistaken, your metaphor has already been appropriated with great success. You can see it in
http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/0d308ebcbb/the-uncler-w-uncle-sam-and-alyssa-milano
lol cheers for that Andre. I’m going to email them my fee :-D
Good but unoriginal. Your typical “down on his luck” protagonist who was at one time great and now wallows in the mud and is trying to redeem himself and is looking for that redemption in the wrong place.
Rourke’s performance was fine. He has better (Barfly, I think). BUT, it’s a pretty lame movie for all the hype it had. My biggest problem was that Evan Rachel Wood’s character was really underwritten and the scenes between her and Rourke felt false, and I don’t think it was the acting, but the script and direction. Both those actors were giving it their all for scenes that were really week. She freaks out too fast, then takes him back into her confidence too fast. It just didn’t feel right to me. I loved the 16mm hand-held stuff… I don’t know. Aronofksy is proving to be a lot weaker than I thought he was. Maybe I’m getting older, and seen a lot more movies, but everything he has done, has seemed really… artificial to me …in retrospect (I used to love the fuck out of Pi). I can’t explain what I mean. I’m not sure. It wasn’t a bad movie…. It was simply OK. …I think… ALSO, I think Wood should’ve shown her tits. That would’ve made it better…somehow. …I don’t mean that.
No. As much as I have enjoyed “Pi,” “Requiem For A Dream” and “The Fountain,” “The Wrestler” was quite underwhelming. I got a more poignant look at the lives of ’80s wrestling superstars a couple years ago at a performance in western North Carolina. As fit and full of vigor as Jerry Lawler and Rick Steiner seemed, to be honest, it was kinda hard seeing Greg “The Hammer” Valentine, with each of his fingers half the size of potatoes. Each one of those guys were great in person, but Greg really “wore” a lot heavier the weight of his punishment in the ring, and that grueling schedule to keep it up. That sticks in my mind a lot more than “The Wrestler.”
And what was it with all those DAMN BEHIND THE HEAD SHOTS of Randy The Ram?! Those were so freakin’ distracting….
The writing had its strengths. Rourke may have played the “typical ‘down on his luck’ protagonist” but the kind of social realism Aronovsky was going for worked rather well. I’m going to have to agree that it was ultimately clichéd and underwhelming, though. It’s aesthetic was tired and contrived (the hand-held 16 stuff and the behind the head traveling shots have all been done better in the past) and all in all it didn’t go anywhere that one couldn’t predict in the first fifteen minutes.
The Wrestler is the anti-Rocky if anything. In Rocky, you want Rocky to succeed. Its a comeback story. In The Wrestler, the traditional comeback story is turned on his head, because the comeback is actually quite damaging to Randy. Randy’s return to the ring is heartbreaking rather than celebratory, because its where he hides when his real life is fucked up. It’s a nice parallel to the whole fake/real discussion about wrestling. He says that out there is the only place where he doesn’t get hurt, he’d rather take physical pain than emotional. Aronofsky further parallels that with an aging stripper, the film ultimately examines what happens when our bodies betray us, something that seems to be a preoccupation of Darren’s (Requiem, Fountain).
SPOILERS
TJ, those behind the head shots gave the film a documentary-like feel, which is a stylistic choice. but also served another purpose. So much of the film harps on Randy’s past, how he is a man living in the past, he plays old video games, he signs autographs with old fogey wrestlers like him, he listens to old music. By shooting it from behind Randy, it seems like Randy is always walking away from something, but his life is inextricably informed by what came before. If you notice in his final entrance the camera finally swings around and he walks toward something. Unfortunately this is his death.
IMO, The Wrestler was the best film of the past year hands down.
Very astute Justin. This is the second time someone’s made me doubt my opinion on the film. I really like the hiding from reality in the “fake” fights in the ring (which, as we see, are not so fake). This really becomes clear when his instinct is to behave like he does in the ring (cutting himself and breaking things if I remember correctly) when he gets fed up of his job at the butcher.
I didn’t remember him walking towards the camera at the end but if that’s true that’s a really cool point. As for the documentary feel of the film, that seems more to me like the current over-used trend in Hollywood and that really turned me off.
Yeah, it makes that butcher scene make a whole lot more sense :)
I actually had a chance to interview Aronofsky after seeing the film and I asked him about the documentary style. His response was that one of the reasons he chose to do it that way was because of his trust for Rourke as an actor. For example in the trailer park scene toward the beginning, he simply turned the camera on and said “go,” and followed Rourke around. Thus that was sort of a necessity thing, to give his actor free reign, that was eventually incorporated into the look of the film.
That’s a neat little tidbit of information but my unshakable cynicism requires me to take it with a grain of salt.
That said, I do appreciate the film and vow to stop giving it such a hard time about the hand-held bandwagon jumping since it seems like I might be wrong about it.
Aronofsky steals from other directors, I’ve been noticing, and the handheld thing is far more derived from something that the Dardenne brothers did in The Son than any dogme film. He also stole, perhaps as some homage to Kurosawa, a direct scene of silence that leads to a huge blast of sound in The Fountain from Ikiru. I don’t know. It was fun watching a movie that focused mostly on a human being as opposed to the narrative focus of so many fucking American movies. There was no jewel, or island, and even a love interest as the main focus, so that was cool.
Rocky and this movie are two different time periods. Movies like The Wrestler don’t seem especially popular in America today, even if it’s a slight idea of what’s being shot in other parts of the world. Rocky, on the other hand, could follow along with Saturday Night Fever, and Coming Home where there’s some afflicted character in the tough world of the seventies. If anything, I’d give The Wrestler props for ever being made in the first place. I think that’s it’s best achievement
In my opinion, every filmmaker “steals’ insane amounts of material from every other filmmaker either consciously (”stealing") or subconsciously.
My favorite scene is when all the old way-way-past-their-prime wrestlers are gathered together at a small-time promotional event in a low-rent building attempting to hawk their autographed t-shirts and video tapes to fans that don’t show up. They are all bored stiff and one old wrestler has fallen asleep. Randy’s just recovering from heart surgery and while sitting among his peers he scans the room and seems to see himself now as one among the ranks of broken-bodied has-beens that no one wants to remember or care about.
Coming home to a locked-out trailer park trailer just after getting beat to hell in the wrestling ring and then having to sleep in the van was as humiliating as it was uncomfortable.
This film is a lot more than any Rocky and Rourke did a great job playing Randy.
Rocky I didn’t like. Sylvester hasn’t enough depth to keep my attention.
Mickey Rourke was brilliant!! This film wouldn’t have worked with any other actor.
A broader theme for me was the consequence of a toxic cultural. Wasn’t Randy a victim of the banal distractions that pervade American culture.
There is no comparison.
@JUSTIN MARBLE
I appreciate ya pointing out a “purpose” for the forced perspective on Randy, showing him from behind and going forward to meet the next event in his life.
But what I should’ve mentioned was that I did understand that it was a stylistic choice, even though I didn’t really “get” or appreciate what kind of purpose it served. That being said, this particular stylistic choice, in my opinion, became more suited for drinking game purposes than it does for a storytelling purpose within “The Wrestler.”
I guess this shows how little of an impression the movie itself made on me that I’m harping on this detail so much. But that forced perspective, while I appreciated it the first couple of times it was used, really became a parody of itself by the end. “Take a shot every time you see the blob of greasy, bleached blonde hair!”
SPOILERS
I’m not completely convinced that Randy died at the end. While I can appreciate a movie that ends on an ambiguous note, if an ending certainly pointed in one direction, i.e. Randy dying, and it didn’t show it through to its conclusion, that to me has the feeling of making the movie incomplete.
In short, the way the movie ended sucked, to me anyway. And I normally don’t gripe so much about movies’ endings.
The Wrestler is one of my favourite ever films (in the top 5 atm). It is near flawless, there are so many scenes that in themselves are just perfect; direction, writing, acting, cinematography, it’s all amazing. This is one of those films that makes me want to go out and grab a camera and make a movie because of the real independent, raw feel you get from watching it. Mickey Rourke is amazing in it, and so is everyone else. Argh! Such an amazing film!
@T.J. Royal – Robert Siegel, the writer came out and has said Randy died. But he noted the ambiguity of it, saying that he could’ve died then or in another fight but the point was that he was going to die doing what he loved.
While still giving in to the hollywood pressure box, “the wrestler” still retains some of Aaronofsky’s brilliant cinematic sense for emotional tradgedy. And what I find about the brilliance( which others see as only depressing) of all of Aaronofsky;’s work is the that “true” tradgedy brings into highlight what is most essentially human, our need for love and relationships.
Prententious cinema-verité bullshit.It’s manipulative and uninteresting.
I love Mickey Rourke’s performance though.Her deserved the Oscar, I could’ve meant a lot to him.Nevermind.
I don’t know whether it’s just another Rocky but for me it was just another Homeboy (1998) in which Rourke plays a down-on-his-luck boxer with relationship troubles who has a brain condition that means if he fights again it might be fatal…
the handheld thing is far more derived from something that the Dardenne brothers did in The Son than any dogme film—-
Aronovsky was pretty upfront about the Dardenne influence of “the handheld thing” in the film. At the same time, there are some obvious differences, so as a crticism this rings as about as simplistic and false as criticizing Van Sant for stealing “the long take thing” from Bela Tarr. It completely ignores the execution.
Maryse Alberti is brilliant with lighting and the film does some really beautiful things with a variety of lighting, etc.
herb
was it???