The Screengrab : mick foley

Mickey Rourke in "The Wrestler" Pleases Mankind, Annoys Iran

Phil Nugent — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Mick Foley, who after years of journeyman work and trying out various personas achieved rasslin' stardom with the WWF as Mankind, has gazed upon Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler and, in Slate, given it his professional seal of approval. Foley, who has written a trio of best-selling memoirs as well as some children's books, reports that he had been approached in the past about writing the definitive wrestling movie and that he turned down an offer to serve as a consultant on the Aronofsky film, figuring that if "I felt like having my name attached to a failure... I'd write another novel." But after attending a screening of the movie, Foley was moved by Mickey Rourke's performance as the faded '80s wrestling icon Randy "the Ram" Robinson, honoring the actor's ability to make "the pathetic seem heroic", and impressed by the film's documentary-style atmosphere. (Aronofsky shot with "working independent wrestlers" and shot "at real independent wrestling shows"; as the director mentions in this interview, this level of verisimitude extended even to the scenes at a New Jersey grocery-store deli counter, where the Ram supplements his meager income by donning a hairnet and spooning out potato salad, and where moviegoers can see Rourke, in character, affably messing around with real customers.) "Rourke", notes Foley, "deserves great credit not only for whipping himself into incredible shape—packing 30 pounds of muscle on for the role—but for doing his wrestling homework. Learning the trade at age 52 could not have been easy, but Rourke's in-ring work is good enough to pass this wrestler's sniff test. No one will ever confuse Randy's clothesline with Stan Hansen's, and the scenes surely benefited from careful editing, but much of what Randy did—his flying 'Ram Jam'; a Japanese enzugiri kick—actually looks pretty good. Importantly, it doesn't look any better than it should. His first in-ring scene, with a starry-eyed rookie thrilled just to be in the same arena with a former mat legend, looks realistically rudimentary."

"And everyone involved—Rourke, Aronofsky, independent wrestler Necro Butcher, stunt coordinator Douglas Crosby—deserves credit for creating a memorable midmovie bloodbath, a fight involving broken glass, barbed wire, a staple gun, and other implements." In fact, "Necro Butcher"--who appears in the cast credits listed as playing his "character" under his real name, Dylan Keith Summers--is one of a many-headed ensemble supporting cast that lends the picture a unique flavor. First seen backstage politely negotiating with Randy about just how much the staple gun will be employed in their match, he looks like a balding high school professor who's let his beard get a little out of hand over summer break. Once he hits the stage dressed only in cut-off jeans, he takes on the air of a deranged hillbilly who's come down from the mountains to seek his fortune working in Rob Zombie movies. As much as the film has been touted as a one-man show for the deserving comeback kid Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler would probably be unbearably bleak if not for the comradely vibe it gets from the weirdly lovable crew of hairless muscleheads and tattooed nightmares swarming over its set, all of whom turn out, on close examination, to be orderly professionals who are deeply solicitous of each other's fears and tender feelings. It's a reminder of what an untapped talent bin wrestling may be for casting directors willing to think outside the box. (Mick Foley, whose likable, smarter-than-you-think schlub act ought to make him a natural for the character actor clubhouse, has performed honorably in such TV series as G. vs. E. and Now and Again and recently turned up in a small role in the thriller Anamorph. Terry Funk, who pioneered the extreme-regular-guy persona that Foley updated for the age of flannel, has done good work in small parts in such pictures as Paradise Alley and Road House. And Foley's old wrestling partner Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson may have entered movies as a side of action beef, but in the last half dozen years, he's grown more as an actor than Stallone or Schwarzenegger did in twenty-five. This is a guy who managed to maintain his dignity in both The Scorpion King and Southland Tales!)

The Wrestler leads to Randy's twentieth-anniversary rematch with a burnoosed opponent known as "the Ayatollah"--played by an African-American wrestler named Ernest "the Cat" Miller-- who he met at Madison Square Garden in 1989, and who tries to garrotte him with a flagpole bearing an Iranian flag. (The movie's terrific opening credits sequence deftly places the match in its context as a high point of the trash culture of the '80s, linking Randy to such swaggering ephemera as the hair-metal rock he loves and the outdated Nintendo game that his most celebrated match inspired.) Apparently '80s nostalgia isn't a big concern of Iran's, because it's being reported that "newspapers and websites" in that country have "condemned the film" for this battle royale sequence, which includes a moment when the mighty Ram snatches the flagpole away and breaks it in two. To be fair, I don't know if they get WWF Smackdown in Tehran, and to a people without the slightest grasp of the nuances of professional wrestling, this imagery must seem like a weird and needless provocation. Still, as far as giving the Iranian government and media something to bitch about, it's a long fall from the heady days of 300 and Persepolis. Maybe, in the spirit of the new, post-Bush, Vince McMahon should be dispatched on a diplomatic mission to explain that, if only the Ram's big match had happened a year later than it did, his opponent would have been wearing an Iraqi military uniform and tried to belt him upside the head with cannisters of nerve gas.

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Leonard Pierce — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 21:15:00 GMT

Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler opens across the country this weekend, and in addition to being hailed as a return to form for the Pi director and a triumphant comeback for shooting star Mickey Rourke, it's also one of an increasingly large number of acclaimed films -- both narrative and documentary -- to deal with professional wrestling. High culture has always had a problematic relationship with rasslin'; it's popularity is undeniable but has always upset the intellectuals of the sporting press, who delight in reminding people that it isn't real, as if its fans don't already know that. It can be lowest-common-denominator entertainment for sub-morons, but it also carries an undeniable emotional heft and a sort of physicalized symbolism that was remarked on at great length by no less august a personage than Roland Barthes, who wrote a famous essay about it for his book Mythologies. And now, years after it was considered an activity significantly less respectable than bowling or roller derby -- the great 'untouchable' sports of the 1950s -- a number of directors have found its combination of artifice and wounded reality irresistible. Here's some of our favorite movies that make reference to life inside the squared circle.

BARTON FINK (1991)

In the Coen Brothers' masterpiece about the art of writing and the way crafting fiction gets in the way of seeing reality, wrestling is used as a metaphor by the highfalutin playwright Barton Fink to symbolize class struggle -- but his inability to complete a simple screenplay in the wrestling genre also serves as a metaphor for his creative blockage. While he seems almost physically incapable of putting words on paper, his flustered producer Ben Geisler (Tony Shalhoub) delivers a classically bewildered line: "Wallace Beery! Wrestling picture! Whattya want, a road map?" Watching the moral and physical struggles of wrestling in stark black and white on cheap B-picture dailies, Fink still can't think of anything -- and is typically dismissive and oblivious when his neighbor Charlie tries to show him a few moves. John Goodman's Charlie will eventually teach him a lesson he'll never forget.

HITMAN HART: WRESTLING WITH SHADOWS (1998)

Bret "Hitman" Hart comes from what can only be described as one of professional wrestling's royal families. His father, a tough-as-nails Canadian legend and a strict disciplinarian who planned his childrens' careers from the crib, runs one of the most respected schools in the sport, and almost everyone around him -- his brothers, his in-laws, his friends -- are involved in pro wrestling. In this A&E documentary, we follow the everyday life of someone immersed in the game: his strained family life, his true feelings about the sport, and his growing discomfort with the storylines being written for him -- which results in one of the most memorable betrayals, both real and staged, in the modern-day history of wrestling. A little-seen film, Wrestling With Shadows is a sharp, perceptive piece of work that deserves a wider audience.

NIGHT AND THE CITY (1950)

Jules Dassin's legendary British film noir would probably have worked just as well if it had featured boxing -- that violent and often rigged sport so beloved by the makers of moody crime dramas -- instead of professional wrestling. But by having Richard Widmark's needy, creepy, desperate little hustler Harry Fabian wrapped up in the sport of wrestling, we get a number of elements that prove highly rewarding: Herbert Lom's compelling performance as Kristo gives some sense of the strange dynastic quality of some of the great wrestling families, and best of all, we get the unforgettable fight scene between Mike Mazurki as the Strangler and Stanislaus Zybyszko as Gregorius. Both men were actual wrestlers -- but Zybyszko, then an astonishing 70 years old, was from the transitional era when it was actually a legitimate sport. His performance in the scene -- almost silent, incredibly brutal, and absolutely mesmerizing -- has both incredible dignity and repulsive, visceral emotion.

BEYOND THE MAT (1999)

Inspired by Wrestling with Shadows and covering a lot of the same thematic territory, Barry Blaustein's Beyond the Mat had a theatrical run and thus attracted a good deal more attention than its predecessor. Both films shared qualities in common, though, from the alternatingly absurd and tragic lives of those who try to make a living as professional wrestlers to the personal dramas of the ring workers that mirror their gamed-out struggles. (They also share the quality of making WWE head honcho Vince McMahon look like an utter fucking creep, but that's not so hard, since he does the same thing himself every time he opens his mouth.) This time out, the most compelling figures are the ruined, crack-addicted wreck Jake "The Snake" Roberts and his opposite number, the witty, gregarious family man Mick Foley.

SPIDER-MAN (2002)

One of the most successful and enjoyable big-screen super-hero adaptations, Sam Raimi's Spider-Man gets a lot of its juice from the way it envisions Peter Parker's origin story without being boring or disrespectful. Since Spider-Man's is one of the most familiar origin stories in comics, Raimi had to do it just right, and one of the just-rightest scenes is the one where Parker, his powers newly acquired but not fully mastered, decides to cash in on them by taking part in a televised wrestling match. Raimi updates the scene by making it a big, flashy, ECW-style 'extreme' competition, but keeps the sense of fun and absurdity, most especially by casting lovable legend Randy Savage as Spidey's squared-circle nemesis, Bonesaw. To this day, the scene is one of my all-time favorites in any superhero movie to date.

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