What I've Watched: The Wrestler

This movie struck the right tone for Dan and I because we were in fact the best type of people to see it. Look, we're both guys who were raised primarily by TV in the '80s. Tom & Jerry, GI Joe, Transformers (not the over-the-top, unrecognizable Michael Bay stuff, the real thing), The Muppets and Saturday morning wrestling. Before it became the Monday Night megacraziness and McMahon changed the name to WWE and stuff like that, Saturday mornings were the best time watch Ric Flair and others in shoddy VFW halls banging out would could not have been more than $150 paychecks.

So watching Mickey Rourke play a washed-up '80s wrestler trying to keep the dream alive is just very real for me, because it's a story Dan and I can see when looking today at the faces of Flair, Sting and others whose prime has long since past. When Rourke plays with a toy figurine of himself 20 years later, you can feel the passion slowly being sapped from him. And in the climactic scene when he must make a potentially fatal choice, you know there is only one real choice to make, even if its a false one. Plus, and many others have noted this, it's Mickey Rourke, a washed-up '80s actor trying to keep the dream alive.

The film is not all perfect, though. The storyline with the daughter (an always reliable Evan Rachel Wood) would have been a lot better had it had more room and dialogue to breathe. It just starts and gets wrapped up much too quickly and easily. The relationship with Marisa Tomei's stripper character is much stronger.

The movie is at its best when you are behind the scenes with the wrestlers plotting out the matches. Nothing seems fake during those scenes, and the improvs and pain they experience comes across exactly as we all thought it did when we watched wrestling in high school and college. Even those of us who have long abandoned it because of age, maturity and exhaustion from the steroids and offensive nature permeating throughout it, you cannot help but get wrapped up in the nostalgia. And when The Ram climbs to the top rope, there is no doubt we all want to jump off with him.