The Wrestler

Micky Rourke delivers the performance of a lifetime in Darren Aronofosky‘s poignant, cinematic smackdown.

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PRE-GAME 💪

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Fox Searchlight / Wild Bunch

Welcome back to Balls on Film! 👋🏻

I’d like to thank my cousin, John, for stopping by this week for a takeover of our Friday movie review. If you missed the announcement last week - John writes comics, and his work includes And Then Emily Was Gone, Oxymoron: The Loveliest Nightmare, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Universe #6 and Glasgow-based crime thriller Sink, all to critical acclaim. His horror anthology series Hotell has been optioned for film, with an adaptation from writer/director Elle Callahan currently in development. John is an avid pro-wrestling fan, so he’s taking the reins this week to review Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler.

Last week, I also shared the upcoming film schedule for the next few weeks. I’ll include it later in the post-game for anyone who missed it.

Don’t forget to check out The Clubhouse this week, where we continued our Ted Lasso rewatch and checked out Simone Biles Rising on Netflix.

With that, I’ll hand over to John. I’ll be back for post-game!

John: Hello! Thanks to my cousin, James, for inviting me to do a guest write-up for Balls on Film. It feels appropriately timed, following last week’s feature on The Karate Kid, and James bringing up how we watched it together. My earliest memories of my lifelong love of film are tied up with memories of James, of us watching films together (often video shop hires we were far too young to be watching!), so it makes me happy that we can still share our love of cinema now.

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FIRST HALF 💪

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As someone with an outspoken love of pro wrestling, it is perhaps of little surprise that I love The Wrestler, the ultimate wrestling film. And yet, I actually can’t watch this film too often. I find it too heartbreaking, one of the most unbearably sad films of recent years.

The Wrestler tells the story of Randy “The Ram” Robinson, a broken-down pro wrestler long past his 1980s prime, who with his declining health finds himself in a position where he’ll have to either give up wrestling or risk ending his life in the ring. And this change in circumstances forces him to take a hard look at what else he has in his life beyond wrestling. It’s a powerhouse of a performance from Mickey Rourke, one of my favourite ever performances from any actor in any film.

Searchlight Pictures / Wild Bunch

Mickey Rourke has long been his own worst enemy as an actor. He has a reputation of being difficult to work with, and when he’s not taking a role that challenges and excites him (which is most of the time), he does little to hide the fact he’s sleepwalking through the part and phoning it in. But when he’s on, boy, he’s on, and as Randy, he gives the performance of a lifetime. Even with Rourke’s larger than life persona, you very soon forget it’s him and just think you’re watching Randy, that roving camera always behind his back plunging you into his world and experience. The pain, both physical and emotional, is written all over him, and while you might imagine such a physically imposing figure would be stoic, Rourke instead plays him as nakedly emotional, tears freely running from his watery eyes, him quite transparently sorrowful and afraid. We are frequently frustrated with Randy, but our heart always goes out to him, and ultimately breaks for him. The fact Mickey Rourke never won the Best Actor Oscar for this role is one of the greatest crimes of Academy Award history.

Searchlight Pictures / Wild Bunch

Randy’s tentative romance with Marisa Tomei’s Cassidy – a stripper, bringing up parallels with Randy as someone else confronting the realities of time and age in a profession ruthlessly built on aesthetics – is sweet and poignant. But the real emotional core of the film lies in Randy’s doomed attempts at reconciliation with his estranged daughter, Stephanie, played by Evan Rachel Wood. Wrestling is sadly an industry filled with stories of broken family relationships. Beyond the Mat featured scenes with Jake “The Snake” Roberts and his daughter that were devastating and difficult to watch, and some of the interactions Randy has with Stephanie here reminded me of that. There’s a point near the end of the film, after Randy has ruined his last shot with Stephanie and she has pushed him out of her life forever, where we see Randy at his big comeback match at a wrestling show, talking to a cheering crowd with the microphone, and he says, “You people here… you’re my family.” At a glance, it might be understandable to perceive this as a moment of triumph, overcoming the odds. But I actually look at it as desperately sad. Randy has lost what actually matters, and the only “family” he has left are a fickle audience who will quickly move onto someone else to cheer once he’s gone.

Searchlight Pictures / Wild Bunch

Darren Aronofsky earns major points from me by taking wrestling largely seriously, rather than poking fun or foregrounding the silliness. He’s upfront right away with the fact that it’s staged, showing how cooperative and mutually supportive a community the wrestlers are before we see them beating each other up, but at the same time he doesn’t shy away from the physicality and the toll it takes, showing that staged doesn’t mean “fake”: the pain is real. It’s appropriate that his next film would be Black Swan, as alongside this the pair become something of a two-hander, each in their own way telling the story of an artist who perform stories using their body, and the cost of their obsession with succeeding in that field.

Searchlight Pictures / Wild Bunch

I remember back when I first watched The Wrestler, I thought to myself, “This is almost as great as Aronofsky’s masterpiece, Requiem for a Dream.” But having returned to Requiem for a Dream recently, while it’s still a great film, it doesn’t quite hold up as well as it did in my initial viewings. The Wrestler, on the other hand, doesn’t just hold up, it might actually be even better with age. This might be Aronofsky’s masterpiece.

The Wrestler is available to rent or buy via most digital stores.

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HALFTIME 💪

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Let’s take a break for halftime.

I wanted to share a couple of non wrestling-based movies that I’ve watched recently and particularly enjoyed, here during halftime.

I Used To Be Funny (Available to rent/buy digitally)

I already knew Rachel Sennott is great. She's been a standout in everything I've seen her in. But while I Used To Be Funny does still give her a chance to flex her comic chops in places, it works really well as a showcase for her versatility in a more dramatic role.

She plays Sam, a former stand-up comedian who's now mostly housebound and suffering from PTSD, who's drawn out of her cocoon when a girl she used to nanny for goes missing. The structure of the film is cleverly done, with the present narrative intercut with fragments of her past, piecing together the events that led to her current state of being. It's a very effective, believable portrayal of the insidious ways trauma can seep into your life and catch you by surprise even when you think you're recovering or being more "normal" for a minute. Rachel Sennott really sells the emotional toll, while also bringing nuance and levity to a role that, with a different touch, could have made for a very bleak, dark movie.

Fancy Dance (Apple TV+)

Lily Gladstone is amazing. A powerhouse of an actress, who should have won the Oscar this year for Killers of the Flower Moon. But even though she didn't, she's of a calibre where she really deserves to be one of those performers who routinely has a film in the mix come awards season. 

Here, in Fancy Dance, she plays Jax, the aunt of a young teenage girl whose mother has gone missing. When child protective services decide this girl is better off without the woman she's lived with her whole life and opt to take her away, Jax and her niece go on the run together. Isabel Deroy-Olson, who plays young Roki, is very good, too, and you know you're always going to get good value when Shea Whigham shows up in a film. But this is Gladstone's movie, another emotionally raw, heartbreaking performance.

Gladstone is probably better than the film itself, to be honest, which is a bit slight and predictable, and doesn't always gracefully balance its various narrative threads. But at its strongest, it offers some moments of real emotional poignancy.

Let’s get back into the ring.

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SECOND HALF 💪

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Let’s jump into some awards and bonus content.

BEST SCENE 🏆

For this one, I’m choosing a two-parter. The wild, blood-drenched hardcore match Randy “The Ram” Robinson has with Necro Butcher is great on multiple levels. First, because it’s chaotic and violent and reflective of some of the gnarliest “extreme” wrestling of the American independent scene. Second, because of the knowledge that the filming of this match was done in front of an actual live wrestling crowd. And third, because Randy’s opponent here is Necro Butcher, an actual wild-man of the ‘00s indie scene who had some of the most notorious, bloody bouts of the era. His 2005 match with Samoa Joe in IWA Mid-South is, to this day, some of the wildest shit I’ve ever seen, so I’m going to share it with you here as a bonus. Whatever your level of experience with wrestling, try watching this through without saying “Oh, FUCK!” out loud at least once. But I said this is a two-parter, because the scene with the match itself doesn’t fully work without the fuller context of the scene that comes before, with Randy talking to an out-of-character Necro Butcher – looking quite nerdy with big glasses – as they calmly go over the construction of the brawl we’re about to witness. It’s such a wonderful depiction of the art of pro wrestling, and the cooperation and trust that a match is built upon.

BEST LINE 🏆

“I left you. You never did anything wrong. I used to try to forget about you. I used to try to pretend that you didn’t exist, but I can’t. You’re my girl. You’re my little girl. And now, I’m an old, broken-down piece of meat… and I’m alone. And I deserve to be all alone. I just don’t want you to hate me.”

Randy’s tearful confession to Stephanie cuts to the core of his character.

MVP AWARD 🏆

While there is actually strong acting across the board in this film, the only answer to give here is Mickey Rourke. His turn as Randy is like a raw exposed nerve, so completely open and vulnerable.

IMDB TRIVIA HIGHLIGHT 🏆

Darren Aronofsky revealed that Mickey Rourke was the first choice to play Randy "The Ram" Robinson but the studio wanted Nicolas Cage. Aronofsky fought to have Rourke as "The Ram", and ultimately won out.

BEST LETTERBOXD REVIEW 🏆

This review is currently sitting at zero likes on Letterboxd, but what can I say? It spoke to me:

BONUS FEATURE 💿

Some of my favourite type of content is actors, directors, writers etc talking about their peers and contemporaries, so I enjoyed seeing this clip with Nicolas Cage expanding on why he dropped out of The Wrestler, and also discussing his appreciation for Mickey Rourke’s work as an actor.

I’ll hand back over to James now for the post-game!

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POST-GAME 🥋

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James: Thanks to John for the takeover this week! I hope you all enjoyed his coverage of The Wrestler, and his halftime recommendations!

If you missed it last week, here’s the upcoming review schedule:

Friday August 9th: Friday Night Lights

Friday August 16th: Little Giants

Friday August 23rd: BASEketball

Remember to let me know what you’d like to see added to the review schedule, and keep your comments coming. Let John and I know what you thought of The Wrestler in the comments too.

See you next week! 👋🏻

~James