Films I: The Wrestler

A trip to the cinema on Wednesday, the first in 2009.  I had last seen Mickey Rourke sometime in the early 1990s, when a friend, who looked 18, got a copy of Wild Orchid from the video store.  Did they? Didn’t they?  Much pausing and rewinding didn’t answer the question.  And now, here in 2009, was Mickey Rourke looking like ... well, nothing on earth.  Perhaps a human Easter Island figure, made out of plasticine,  hair dye, and poloni.  In the film – a kind of art house rocky, combined with freakish come-back, he really was a wrestler, Raging Bull-Miller-Lite –  he makes a series of phone calls to his estranged daughter from increasingly distraught telephone boxes in the bleakest parts of New Jersey.  There’s even a pile of moulding railway sleepers next to one.  His daughter is living, he suspects, with her girlfriend, and a new sense of purpose provided by his heart attack at the end of a gruesome ‘necro-wrestling’ match, along with some encouragement from his ‘tart with a heart’ stripper, near-squeeze, and 80s poodle-rock fan Marisa Tomei, leads him to try and get in touch with her again.  His method?  Bearing gifts, including a ridiculous silk, wrestling style sweater with her initial on it.  Needless to say, apart from a board-walk memory moment they share, it ends, literally in tears after a drink and sex-induced night of fireman impersonating sex causes him to forget their father-daughter rapprochement dinner.  Meanwhile, our man, the ‘Ram’ to give him his ring-side title, bores of his retirement work as a delicatessen sever (we hear earlier how he’s nothing but a used up piece of meat), and returns for one final match, a 20-year on reunion with ‘The Ayatollah’ (now a successful Arizonan car dealer).  The symbolism is about as subtle as Rourke’s fascinating, massive face, and somehow as engaging and puzzling.  There is the war (‘hit him with the false leg’, veterans lodges, the aforementioned Ayatollah, etc.) He drives a Ram van, he suffers the little children (in his trailer park, who see him as a hero – he is, of course, still a child himself), he sacrifices himself for his crowd, the Passion is quoted by Tomei (I’m not sure if we see more of his butt or hers?), and the cinematography makes the ring a Golgotha.  Finally, he sacrifices himself in one final, heartstopping (ahem) ramjam, and we wonder if the director (Aronofsky) is making the point that the crucifixion was one almighty ‘ah, fuck it’ moment.  And speaking of, my friend mentioned at the start of this synopsis is now a vicar.