Mickey Rourke as Randy “The Ram” Robinson in “The Wrestler” (2008)
There are some great performances that owe at least a portion of their greatness to factors outside the talent of the actor taking the role. And the one moment in Aronofsky’s catalogue where lightning was undeniably bottled, and a real-life persona and a role conflated to an almost transcendent degree, was Mickey Rourke playing the physically ruined, emotionally broken Randy “The Ram” Robinson, a professional wrestler on the irreversibly downward-sliding portion of his later career. Rourke’s own history, as an actor-briefly-turned-pro-boxer with a gossip-column-worthy personal life, hellraising reputation and several arrests, brings added nuance to his character, but even if you were totally unaware of any of that, it’s how his own story is writ large across his face (messed up by some disastrous cosmetic surgery) and across the weary but pumped set of his muscled, aging body that gives the movie its fascinating physicality. Because it is all about physicality—selling the spectacle of your body for money, and what happens when that body starts to give out—all themes that have close parallels to an actor’s life and to Rourke’s in particular. But it’s not just metatextuality that makes this performance so outstanding. Ever the method actor, Rourke is committed and vulnerable, right down to the bone and gristle of the part (though apparently he found the supermarket scenes the hardest, as he “connected to the shame”), and Aronofsky wisely knows to get out of the way; this is the least adorned of the director’s films and all the stronger for it. It was of course written with Rourke in mind, though briefly Nicolas Cage was mooted, but while there’s no doubt “The Wrestler” would have been an interesting film no matter who took the role, it’s Rourke who invests this small, specific story with such grand, operatically tragic overtones. Oscar-nominated, though beaten by Sean Penn for “Milk,” Rourke’s comeback may have stalled somewhat since, but we’re very glad he got at least this gracenote performance. “The Wrestler” preaches, after all, that in whatever form—love, family, career—everyone deserves a second shot, whatever you end up making of it.
Marisa Tomei as Cassidy in “The Wrestler” (2008)
Marisa Tomei’s Best Supporting Actress Oscar for “My Cousin Vinny” may have been the subject of maybe the meanest of Awards rumors (the thoroughly debunked speculation that Jack Palance called out her name in error, and the Academy covered up the gaffe), she has made good on the award retroactively in films like “In the Bedroom” and “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.” But she’s probably never been better than here, playing the perfect foil to Mickey Rourke’s showier, central role, but holding her own and imbuing her character, Cassidy, with such hard-won wisdom that she’s a much realer, more rounded and oddly dignified character than the “aging stripper” tag might suggest. Of course the parallels between her profession and that of the pro-wrestler are very clearly drawn, but both actors are so completely at home in their characters that none of it feels contrived, especially not the tenderness that underlies their mutual, tentative reaching out to one another. And it never strays too far into full-on love affair either; there’s always a hard streak of pragmatism to Cassidy’s relationship with Randy, that reinforces the idea that she is the stronger of the two, or perhaps she’s just not quite as calcified into old, self-destructive patterns. Which is not to say that Tomei’s experience on the film was not extremely gruelling too, with Aronofsky’s fondness for exploring different ways into a scene resulting in many multiple takes. “… even just the dance alone was 26 takes and that’s like two minutes of dancing on a pole. That’s really a lot. And that was not one day, that was part of a day. It was a very, very physically challenging shoot,” said the actress in an interview. But with this film, claims Tomei, Aronofsky “intended to make an actor’s piece and he cherished us and we’re very grateful to him,” and its vérité, lo-fi feel does make it seem like something of an outlier in the director’s output, even as it’s a highlight for the actress. She gained a third Best Supporting Actress nomination for the role, and safe to say had her name and not Penelope Cruz’s (for “Vicky Cristina Barcelona“) been called that year, no one would have suggested there’d been a mistake.
