Oh, Mickey, You're So Fine

There was probably no awards-season film I was more eager to see this year than Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler — but as someone who knows almost nothing about professional wrestling, there was also no film I felt less qualified to write about. And so I made a point of watching it with my SEE colleague James Hamilton, who watched WWF matches on TV all through the ’80s, and who, as a talented Edmonton actor and playwright, also brought to his viewing of the film an acute appreciation of Mickey Rourke’s performance as Randy “The Ram” Robinson, a onetime wrestling star now aging, broke, living in a trailer, working a shitty minimum-wage job, and picking up some extra cash doing small-time wrestling matches on the weekends.

After the film was over and we had wiped the tears from our eyes (but in a manly way!), we sat down to share our thoughts about the film. Here’s our conversation.

Paul: Now, I have never watched professional wrestling, I’ve never had any interest in it, even when I was younger. Whereas you...

James: Whereas I was the guy with the poster on his bedroom wall.

Paul: Who was the poster of?

James: My all-time favourite was Jake “The Snake” Roberts. Which is funny, because I know Jake’s real life story kind of resembles The Ram’s in The Wrestler.

Paul: I was going to ask you if Rourke’s character seemed modelled on a specific wrestler. Did you see any parallels in the film to actual figures from the wrestling world?

James: Absolutely. There’s so many guys who were so big in the ’80s — Jake The Snake, Koko B. Ware, guys like that — who would sell out arenas but wound up doing small-circuit wrestling, just hoping WWF agent would see them and go, “You know, it’s time to give The Snake another try.” And poor Jake — he was so addicted to painkillers and alcohol... He had children and a couple of ex-wives who didn’t want anything to do with him, and the only family he really had was that wrestling audience.

Paul: There was a piece in Slate recently by Mick Foley, who gave the film a lot of praise for capturing the milieu so accurately.

James: The guy in the film — the one who fights Rourke in that really hardcore match with the staplegun and the barbed wire — I can see as being based on Mick Foley. Foley was never a guy who’d go off the top rope or wrap his thigh around the other guy’s neck and do a backflip — he was about the barbed wire match and the flaming two-by-four. He might have had bad knees and a bad back, but fuck it — he could still take a staple in the face. I could see how he’d be impressed by this movie, for sure.

Paul: The movie certainly has a lived-in quality. It seems to know this world inside and out. Some of the best scenes take place backstage at these two-bit wrestling matches, with the guys just hanging out before the show, hashing out the choreography for the various fights.

James: And there’s a great echo of that in the scene where he dances with his estranged daughter and in the abandoned ballroom and she says, a little surprised, “You’re a great dancer.” Well, of course he is. He’s been dancing his entire life.

Paul: We have to talk about Mickey Rourke’s performance, which genuinely is incredible. I think that scene with his daughter was what really epitomized his work in this film for me — that moment when he pretty much begs her to forgive him and let him back into her life. It’s so pure, so direct, so vulnerable, so free of any kind of actorly artifice — just these simple words coming out of his ruined face. There’s something unfaked about this performance. People are talking about this movie as Rourke’s comeback vehicle, although arguably you could say that it was really Sin City that brought Rourke back into people’s consciousness. He was playing the same sort of character in that movie too — this violent guy with a terrifying, brutish appearance that belied a soft heart — but where Sin City was all flash and artifice, The Wrestler has a lot less “style” but a lot more heart.

James: I’ve always loved Mickey Rourke. It’s interesting to me how, after becoming a star in Diner and Angel Heart and movies like that, he showed no interest in becoming a big screen pretty-boy. He all but retired from movies to take up boxing- after a couple years of that, he was almost unrecognizable. By the end of that ‘career’ it was an impossibility for him to come back to play the leading man anymore. This is supposed to be his big comeback, but I don’t know what kinds of roles he can even play now.

Paul: That’s exactly the question I had. Where does he go from here? He’s lined up a couple of paycheque jobs in the Iron Man sequel and in this action movie, The Expendables, with Sylvester Stallone and Jason Statham, but with that face of his and all that baggage that he brings to a part, it’s almost like he needs any role he takes on now to be tailored specifically to his persona. Were there any other moments in Rourke’s performance that you particularly responded to as an actor?

James: What really, really affected me was how he tries so hard to separate Randy The Ram from Robin the Safeway worker — the guy with the joe job as opposed to the guy on the top rope. And the thing is, eventually you’re going to get recognized. It’s inevitable. That really hit home for me.

Paul: You’ve had that very job, right?

James: Absolutely — I’ve worked in the deli, I’ve worked in the rotisserie kitchen, making chickens, and as I’m giving someone a breast meal, they’ll recognize me from some show I was in, and I’ll go, “No, that wasn’t me. I’m the guy who works in the kitchen.”

Paul: The movie seems very much in touch with all the details of work. I love that section of the film where you follow Randy as he prepares for a match coming up on the weekend — he doesn’t just have to hit the gym; he’s gotta go to the tanning salon, he’s gotta go to the hairdresser.... And one of the film’s great achievements is that it takes this setting that could easily seem so ridiculous, and while there’s a lot of humour in there, there aren’t any cheap shots. It refuses to look down on that world or the guys who work in it.

James: Or, more importantly, the fans. It doesn’t look down on them for a second. They’re Randy’s family. He gave up everything else for them. That was a huge thing for me — it doesn’t portray them as drooling idiots looking for blood.

Paul: The fans are really decent to him.

James: Absolutely. They see the art in what he does and they love him for it!

Paul: And in his speech to the crowd before that final match, he acknowledges that love. And then you get the match itself, which sets up a really nice irony in that even though it’s a fake fight, Randy really could die at any moment.

James: What I loved about it is that Marisa Tomei’s character, Pam, the stripper who Rourke courts throughout the film, is there, but she can’t bring herself to watch it and leaves. Everyone is there to see it but her.

Paul: Most of the ink about this movie has been devoted to Mickey Rourke, but it’s important to note that Marisa Tomei is terrific as well. It’s very much a parallel story — she’s a stripper, another somewhat disreputable, very physical profession that’s absolutely unforgiving to you as you age. And while she’s not quite in the desperate straits that Randy is in, she is getting older and you have to think it’s only a matter of time before that happens. Now, maybe the film hits those similarities a little heavily, but she’s still completely convincing in the role, both emotionally and physically.

James: It probably wouldn’t be quite as powerful or affecting, but the movie could just as easily have been told from her character’s perspective. The scene that really won me over — for both actors, actually — was the scene where they go to the dollar store to look for a present for Randy’s daughter, where Pam tries to talk him into buying her this cool peacoat, but he keeps getting drawn to the shiny blouse with the monogrammed “S” on it.

Paul: I love the scene just a little bit later at the bar, where Ratt’s “Round and Round” starts playing on the jukebox, and Randy, completely without irony, says how they don’t make great songs like that anymore. And how ’80s metal used to be so great “until that Cobain pussy came along and ruined everything.” Now, I don’t know if you’ve seen JCVD, the upcoming movie with Jean-Claude Van Damme playing himself, but it’s also about a symbol of ’80s machismo who’s also dealing with an aging body, a broken family, and a faded career. What’s going on here, do you think?

James: We’re watching our idols get older and become less bulletproof and more human. And that really affects us! Look at Hulk Hogan — at his peak, he was a 250-pound man, 6’7”, golden locks down to his shoulder blades. Now his pecs are sagging, his hair starts back here... Hogan isn’t the same guy anymore.

Paul: But does Hogan have the self-awareness that it would take to take a long, hard look in the mirror and make a movie like this, or like JCVD? Is he just too successful? I mean, he’s still on network TV.

James: I think you’re right. Life is still just too good for him. But there’s only a handful of guys who came up in the ’80s and for whom that’s still true. You can probably count them on the fingers of one hand. So many of the others put all their eggs in one basket, that basket being Vince McMahon and the WWF, and now they’re fucked. They’ve got nothing.

Paul: Rourke really does seem believably down on his luck. But you also believe that he would have had the charisma to be a huge star in his heyday. But Aronofsky and his production designers do an outstanding job of getting all the surrounding details right too. That “Randy The Ram” Nintendo game is absolutely perfect, the VHS “Best of Randy The Ram” tapes that he’s still selling at the memorabilia shows. And that strip club where Tomei’s character works seems exactly at the right level of “classiness.”

James: When those kids tell her they don’t want her to give them a lapdance, they want the blonde with the gold chain around her waist — that pretty much says it all. So heartbreaking!

Paul: It’s a movie that’s unusually conscious of its characters’ finances. Randy can’t even get into his shitty trailer until he does that gig and gets his little envelope of money. He can’t get more hours at his supermarket job because he can’t work weekends — that’s when he wrestles!

James: As an actor, I know what that’s like. I’ve had to turn jobs down because I couldn’t work weekends either — I’ve had to rehearse or do a play or whatever. It happens.

Paul: And like acting, it’s a job that probably isn’t all that financially remunerative. Is there anything else we should say about the film before we wrap this up?

James: I can’t think of anything — except to say I enjoyed it thoroughly. What about you?

Paul: Oh, I loved it too. I’m also excited by the way that it takes a filmmaking style that has pretty much been the domain of arthouse directors like the Dardenne brothers — no music, very in-the-moment, the camera kind of relentlessly following the characters around, practically sitting on their shoulder as they move through their world — and applies it to material that’s maybe not exactly mainstream, but which stands a chance of doing pretty good business.

James: Oh, without a doubt. I think this is going to get a really wide audience.

Paul: Wider than Rosetta got, that’s for sure.