MARTY MURRAY'S FILM REVIEW OF "THE WRESTLER"

The Wrestler - five stars out of five

This is an absolute heartbreaker of a film to watch. Mickey Rourke portrays onetime major wrestling star Randy "The Ram" Robinson, who is now forced to put his aging body through a gruelling fight circuit just to make ends meet and to pay for all the drugs and painkillers he has to take. He lives alone in a trailer, is estranged from his daughter, and is trying to start up a relationship with a stripper, played by Marisa Tomei. After an especially brutal match which involves a staple gun, he suffers a heart attack and has to undergo bypass surgery. Faced with the fact that he can no longer wrestle, he tries to pull the remnants of his life together.

Daniel Day Lewis may have taken the Best Actor Oscar for his bizarre impersonation of John Huston in There Will Be Blood, but honest to God, Rourke deserved it for this incredible performance. I haven't seen anything as real, as heartfelt and as heartbreaking in years. The ambiguous ending only serves to further the entire plot of the film, but either way, you know that The Ram's wrestling career is over, and if he wanted to go out in a blaze of final glory, he succeeded.


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