Karina on SpoutBlog

Under discussion:

The Wrestler  (2008)

Darren Aronofky’s handheld camera follows Mickey Rourke from behind for the first several scenes of The Wrestler. It’s apparently impossible for contemporary directors to use this technique without someone suggesting that they ripped it from a Dardenne film, but its use in The Wrestler feels very different from its use in, say, L’Enfant: it doesn’t produce the same sense of a tension that could break if the camera ever allowed its subject to get too far away. In fact, several times, the camera just stops while Rourke keeps moving, allowing us to appreciate the full physicality of the actor’s performance long before we ever see his face. There must be a cerebral component to the way Rourke approached becoming aging wrestler Randy “The Ram” Robinson, because otherwise I doubt he’d have been able to so deftly navigate the character’s expansive emotional arc while still nailing all the jokes. But this performance goes way beyond the brain, or the precision with which Rourke transformed his appearance, or even the naturalism with which he performs the wrestling choreography. This is a performance that seems to start and end in the cardiovascular system, making everything Rourke actually does seem effortless. As if he’s just breathing it.

A wrestling superstar in the 80s (famous enough, at his peak, to have his own 8-bit representation jumping off the ropes in a Nintendo game), 20 years later Randy is barely holding it together, sleeping in a van when his trailer is padlocked for failure to pay rent, unloading boxes at a supermarket to make the cash from small-time meets stretch to cover his bleach, tanning and human growth hormone habits. Randy remains fiercely committed to the sport, even though his body’s not what it used to be, and even though the sport –– at least on a mainstream, big-money level –– no longer has much interest in him. With the 20th anniversary coming up of Randy’s biggest fight, a face-off with an Iranian flag-waving wrestler by the name of The Ayatollah, Randy’s producer approaches him with “two words: Re. Match.” This gives Randy something to work on other than the hot-and-cold affections of aging stripper Pam (Marisa Tomei), but when a particularly intense fight results in serious injury, Randy has to turn off autopilot and reevaluate his options.
That this all manages, for the most part, to avoid sports film fall-rise cliches and veer into unexpected directions whilst exploring a wide range of feeling, is a minor miracle. It’s a cliche to say that Rourke’s performance is “fearless” but, well, it is. But it only works as well as it does because of the economy of The Wrestler’s construction, the stealthiness of Aronofsky’s craft.

You might have heard that The Wrestler doesn’t look or feel much like a Darren Aronofsky film. This has, most often, been said with relief by people who had grown skeptical of the filmmaker who, with Requiem for a Dream and then The Fountain, tried critical patience with his perceived bottomless indulgence for visual trickery. It’s true that The Wrestler’s style is, at least compared to Aronofsky’s previous two films, bare-bones, and the cutting is relatively sedate. But in its own way, it’s just as much of a film built on setpieces as Requiem, and just as dependent on style to draw lines between inner lives and external action and circumstance.

At the NYFF press conference, Aronofsky acknowledged that the goal was to stick to “the documentary style” as much as possible. This goes beyond the almost always hand-held camera: the wrestling scenes were shot at “real” meets staged by the production, with real current and former wrestlers as extras and as Rourke’s opponents, Tomei learned from and danced alongside professional strippers. There is something undeniably farcical about a name-brand filmmaker (whose wife is currently on the cover of VOGUE, no less), dropping two movie stars into facsimiles of lower-class American life, produced with the “realism” of non-fiction film in mind.

But it works. The documentary tropes end up playing as a drag, which tempers the absurdity of the nuts and bolts of Pam and Randy’s jobs and lives, and makes their more melodramatic moments seem all the more plausible. And Aronofsky know when he can get away with dropping these tropes (as when Randy makes an entrance at his supermarket job to the sound of a crowd cheering in anticipation) and when he can’t. The stylistic quick-change allows us to transform back and forth between objective observer and subjective participant. As a filmmaker, you could say Aronofsky has moved from digital surrealism to a photorealist presentation of a hyperreal world.

If Aronofsky gets away with his constructed reality, its a testament to the work of screenwriter (and former Onion writer) Rob Siegel that The Wrestler’s characterizations can be comical, but never really condescending. And in the ways in which Randy and Pam find common ground, the filmmakers carry across a subtext of cultural critique. At the risk of giving too much away, both Randy and Pam traffic in a kind of fear of intimacy for a living: they take on personas that are very much about what their bodies look like and how they can move and what kind of power they can exert, and they perform for crowds looking for a kind of vicarious thrill, but their admirers never see anything but the surface. Both past their prime to some extent, at one point the pair bond on their mutual nostalgia for the 80s, particularly the music, which Randy says was all about having fun. “And then that pussy Cobain had to come along and ruin it for everyone,” he gripes. “The 90s sucked,” Pam agrees.

The Wrestler is about two people whose professions are in someway dependent on 80s ideas of gender and entertainment and escape, who were left behind in a way when pop culture took a turn away from fantasy, towards something supposedly more authentic, more real. But fantasy is a tool that most of us use to deal with reality. This has been, in some way, the subject of each of Aronofsky’s films, which makes The Wrestlerone of a piece.

This review originally appeared during the Sundance Film Festival. Ballast opens in New York today.

Ballast is the kind of movie that I’m predisposed to enjoy––a slow, score-free and sometimes actually silent character study, offering the chance to spend some time watching real-ish people floating in and out of a crisis point, demanding that we engage by refusing to pander for that engagement––and yet its wonders still crept up on me. But falling for a movie is like falling for anything, I guess; you don’t really know it’s happening until the undeniable gut punch.

For me, that moment came about two thirds of the way through Ballast, with a shot of a young boy lying on the floor, listening to adults speak off camera while absentmindedly stroking the belly of a giant dog. Like every shot in Lance Hammer’s feature directorial debut, it’s dead simple but beautifully composed, and it gets you by playing hard to get.

The story begins with the suicide attempts of twin brothers Lawrence and Darius. Darius’ is successful, Lawrence’s is not, and after surgery and therapy, he returns to the dreary plot of land he shared with his brother and delivers a letter that passes for a will to Marlee, the estranged mother of Darius’ child. That child, 12 year-old James, is developing a taste for guns and crack (the local drug dealers, maybe five years his senior, are the only professional role models in spitting distance) which in short time leads to Marlee being beaten so badly that she’s fired from her job as a janitor. First James and then Marlee reluctantly turn to Lawrence for help, and in the name of making Marlee a living and giving James an education, the three move towards a tentative partnership and with it, a renewed reason to live.

It’s hardly a honeymoon, and some of Ballast’s most impressive moments come from the deliberate drawing of the friction between the three, as they stumble towards some kind of familial intimacy. Lawrence is wracked with shock and heartbreak over the loss of his twin; Marlee, a former addict living hand to mouth, barely in control of her own life in spite of desperate efforts, is clearly terrified that she’s lost all ability to help her son as well. Each adult needs the other, but both are too broken and wary to accept it. As Hammer’s camera hops slowly from one cold, blue-gray setup to the next, the two engage in countless rounds of emotional combat, with every couple of gains counteracted by a major loss. As their mutual trust builds, Marlee and Lawrence each make a gesture of physical intimacy towards the other, and each is rejected. Both times, Hammer’s camera sits on the instigator as they swallow their humiliation, and you can almost physically feel it burn.

Hammer shot Ballast on 35mm in the winter’s available light in rural Mississippi, with a cast of non-professional local actors, and discarded his script in order to flesh out the story via a two-month rehearsal process. The look, locale and subject matter couldn’t more different from Hannah Takes the Stairs, but with Ballast Hammer joins Joe Swanberg in the club of American filmmakers who are turning to stripped-down production methods and intense improvisation in search of emotional truth. The more that films like this manage to break through the wall of noise at festivals like Sundance, the better chance critics, filmmakers and audiences have of seeing each movie both on its own terms, and as part of a larger wave of back-to-basics American independent filmmaking that defies pejorative genre classifications.