The Wrestler Review

"Rocky" has a lot to answer for. The boundary-pushing, high concept slice of pure cinema from Sylvester Stallone casts its shadow long over any sports-based pretender to the feel good throne. So it was perhaps inevitable that Darren Aronofsky's "The Wrestler", with its similar themes of struggle and retribution, would be compared with Stallone's slugger.

Well, it's a lazy comparison as "The Wrestler" occupies a strange and beautiful space of its own making. For instance, I'm pretty sure that Rocky didn't have half as many hook ups as Randy 'The Ram' Robinson and Adrian certainly didn't work in a strip joint...at least not that I recall. Randy's family have all but disowned the ageing grappler, his 'lady' is as shady as they come and is never there for him when it matters the most and what's more his body is giving up the ghost. This may sound like a spoiler but Randy is fighting for more than one family and it's how he strives to please his loyal fans than really makes Aronofsky's Rocky Redux tick.

Mickey Rourke plays Randy 'The Ram' - a man who once used to be lord and manor of all he surveyed in the Sports Entertainment scene - he was the Hulk Hogan of his generation but unlike that other peroxide pariah, The Ram suffered a rather large fall from grace. His star all but flickering out, Randy finds himself beaten, bloodied and literally broken whilst strutting his stuff on the local circuit (and dishing out the odd autograph at lonely conventions).

Aronofsky follows his charge with such an earnest and sombre lens that the unflinchingly downbeat mood permeates in to your very being. It's as if Randy's crippling lows are contagious! Of course this is also largely due to Rourke's performance. The plaudits are indeed deserved, but with everyone dubbing Rourke the Comeback Kid (like a typically colourful wrestler one imagines) it's easy to lose track of the fact that the man has been tearing up our screens for quite a few years (barring the odd straight to DVD debacle).

This is another in a long line of mesmerising performances by Rourke and one supported by two equally strong turns by the ladies. Marisa Tomei has never been better as the washed up stripper Cassidy, the sometime girl of The Ram. Her journey of discovery, starkly realising that she is a 40-year old body strutting her stuff in a 20-year old's world, mirrors, or more appropriately is the exact obverse, of Randy's trip from the canvas to the hospital bed and back again. Just to make sure the barn is well and truly stormed on the acting front is "Thirteen" star Evan Rachel Wood as Randy's estranged daughter. Wood practically fills her scenes to bursting with a lifetime of disappointment in her eccentric and absentee father.

Aronofsky, by reining in his more flashy instincts, has crafted a back-to-basics gem in "The Wrestler". Indeed, only momentarily, when the Ram's injuries are picked over (with mutual flashbacks to how said injuries came to be) do you realise you are watching a Darren Aronofsky film. Of course this is the whole point. By going for anonymity, he is joining The Ram on his journey of redemption in a very literal fashion after being dumped out of the ring with "The Fountain".

"The Wrestler" is a melancholy masterpiece.