The Wrestler

The Oscar-nominated performances of both Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei are superbly matched and key components in the muscular emotionality of The Wrestler’s unfolding drama. Randy “The Ram” Robinson (Rourke) is an aging professional wrestler, playing out the tag-end of his career in low-rent matches and thread-bare nostalgia meets. He’s still buff enough to draw a little extra cash on the weekends, but there’s no hiding the signs of physical wear and tear. A post-match heart attack throws his entire existence into a state of full-on crisis. By that point, he’s already trying to make something more enduring out of the very part-time relationship he has with his favorite strip-club dancer—Pam (Tomei), and is moving to attempt a reconciliation with his alienated daughter Stephanie (Evan Rachel Wood). Robert Siegel’s fitfully inspired screenplay sets up some provocative parallels between the lives, professional and otherwise, of the wrestler and the stripper, with combinations of physical beauty, rituals of illusion, sham identities and commercial exploitation all playing into the chief characters’ personal travails. Feather River Cinemas and Tinseltown. Rated R