The Dying Animal

The final moments of The Wrestler find Mickey Rourke’s Randy “the Ram” Robinson lifting himself off the canvas, crawling to the corner post, climbing wearily atop his makeshift altar, and, to the adoring clamour of his fans, jumping off the top rope into nowhere. That Randy never lands, that the moment we’re left with is one of empty space and suspended breath, speaks to Darren Aronofsky’s shrewdness, his understanding of what this movie’s really about. The basic narrative structure of Robert D. Siegel’s script is rather formulaic, the Sundance-friendly down-and-out redemption tale, if you will, with a number of threadbare contrivances, particularly when dealing with Randy’s attempted reconciliation with his estranged daughter Stephanie, who’s played at too consistently high an emotional pitch by Evan Rachel Wood.

Aronofsky seems aware of the story’s limitations and places his emphasis elsewhere. Coming after the director’s almost oppressively spectacular Requiem for a Dream and The Fountain—a film famous for being booed at the very same festival where The Wrestler later took the top prize—the visual style adopted here seems shockingly low-key, as un-flashy as the wintry Jersey locales. The camerawork, by Maryse Alberti, is hand-held, almost purely observational, willing to doggedly follow its protagonist, a technique that, echoing the Dardenne brothers, leads to an unusual number of shots of the back of Rourke’s head in the opening scenes, as though Aranofsky wants to delay our looking this wounded old animal in the eyes. It’s a brilliant tactic, because this animal, as well as the milieu he moves in, is the true subject of our fascination and our empathy.

While The Wrestler overall feels admirably workmanlike, Rourke’s performance is by contrast a masterwork, though his collaborators deserve credit for helping to cultivate it. On one level the movie’s a sort of documentary, not only about the bizarre world of exhibition wrestling, from the congenial backstage orchestrations of flamboyant combat to the drug culture to enormously entertaining scenes of beefy guys shopping for shit to smack each other with in dollar stores, but about the ways in which our bodies betray us and our movie stars age. Randy the washed-up wrestler who was a star in the 80s is played by Rourke the washed-up actor who was a star, not to mention a pretty brilliant actor, in the 80s. How character and actor align here is transfixing, disarming, and at times affectingly grotesque.

It may sound incongruently highfalutin to speak of a movie as marginal as Jacques Nolot’s Before I Forget in the same breath as The Wrestler, but the two films have something remarkable in common: each one allows us to closely view a man’s once beautiful body wearied if not positively ravaged by time and experience. Rourke’s face has been worked on in more ways than one. His frame is engorged strangely. His flesh has assumed the ruddy glow of an over-roasted turkey. Yet through this battered shell an old charisma achingly radiates, as does a desperation that’s almost palpable. I don’t mean in any way to slight Rourke’s performance or label it artless by drawing so much attention to mere presence. On the contrary, everything Rourke brings to the film is in the service of building a complex, highly specific character and telling this particular story.

Likewise, Marisa Tomei’s Cassidy, the stripper and single mother with whom Randy attempts to forge a relationship once he realizes that health issues are conspiring to end his career—and, most unnervingly, that he’s utterly alone in the world—is at once vulnerable, physically and emotionally, and sharply defined. In a sense Tomei’s efforts are even more laudable since her character is underdeveloped, a deficiency Aronofsky tries in vain to remedy with a prolonged, purposeless scene of her performing at the club. Tomei’s best moments are the ones devoted toward deepening our sense of Randy’s plight, like the scene in which Randy and Cassidy go to a bar in the afternoon and proudly declare their nostalgia for the hair metal days of their youth. Tomei fearlessly embraces the silliness of this shy bit of courtship, and Rourke, doing a little dance to the canned Ratt in his plaid shirt and duct-taped puffy coat, hair extensions swinging, is absurdly endearing.

But there’s another scene these two share that pretty much announces the most troubling theme of The Wrestler in a manner that’s in perfect sympathy with the characters’ relative lack of sophistication. Cassidy raves to Randy about The Passion of the Christ, about the unholy battery of abuse heaped upon Mel Gibson’s gladiatorial incarnation of Jesus, and Randy, though he hasn’t seen the movie, takes its appeal as a matter of course. Both Cassidy and Randy have devoted their professional lives to the exhibition and exploitation of their flesh, and theirs is a masochistic glory that delivers rewards in diminishing returns.

In the movie’s single funniest, most appalling moment, an ecstatic fan, some kid with no legs, begs Randy to beat his opponent with his artificial limb. Randy shrugs and dutifully complies. It’s proposed then that each of us craves this contact with punishment. Each of us wants to participate in the grinding down of our bodies made into theatre. And this might also explain why so many people who might not normally pay tickets for a wrestling match will part with their cash to see The Wrestler and, in some way that can’t quite be put into words, walk away satisfied, and feeling a little more alive.

Written on the body: the generous frankness, smoky pensiveness and silent articulation of Jacques Nolot's Before I Forget

A curious thing about Jacques Nolot’s Before I Forget (Avant que j'oublie): the title implies urgency, yet the film, now on DVD from Strand Releasing, is anything but. The writer/director/actor’s presence throughout seems to be perpetually fixed upon a point of pause, of consideration, we suppose, a cigarette burning away between his fingers like some substitute hourglass to mark time, his largely immobile face betraying no inner call to action. He says at one point that he wants nothing, which doesn’t entirely ring true, but the calming of desire, or at least its complication by age, illness and the small rewards of reflection, certainly appears to have marked this character in some irreversible way. Right up until the final moments, even when he’s radically altered his appearance, his capacity to linger is tremendous.

But then exactly what sort of task is it that Nolot’s Pierre—another variation on the other Pierres Nolot has portrayed in his previous three films, Manège (1986), Hinterland (98) and Porn Theatre (02)—needs to perform in advance of memory’s erosion? With his emotions rarely manifesting in any flamboyant or dramatic manner, what do we really know of the inner life of this guy?

We know he’s around 60, and his health is so-so. He takes pills that he says interfere with his ability to orgasm, and an early scene follows him as he wakes in the dead of night to be sick. We learn later that he’s been HIV-positive for more than 20 years. He makes a habit of hiring young men for sex. In his very particular deadpan, he tells a cop through his building’s intercom system that his lover has left him and that he’s very sad. He bears an exceedingly French moustache that he says he wouldn’t dare shave off, a sign of vanity, or at least a stubbornness about his image, that can be gauged against the sobering effects of time on his body, which we see naked—naked in a way that bodies rarely are in movies—for prolonged periods, especially the pronounced paunch he cloaks with baggy suits. He visits a few friends, other gay men of a certain age, with similarly lonely lives, and he visits a shrink, speaking frankly to all of them. He keeps his dead father’s barbershop in a corner of his Paris apartment. He spends a great deal of time at his desk, trying to write, but distracted by the past. An old lover of his is dying, and he’s to inherit money.

We witness Pierre frequently in moments of monetary transaction. Well, we witness Pierre paying others to be more precise: the young hustlers, the shrink, the cashier at the grocery we see him visit in a striking sequence that cuts between his grocery shopping with the auctioning off of his old lover’s valuable art collection. He lives modestly, yet there is a special emphasis in this rigorously observational, unobtrusive movie on the funds he expends. The diminishing savings, the diminishing desires, the body in quiet, gradual decline: as things fall apart, Before I Forget makes no effort to wring the situation for high emotions of any kind, yet it presents a visually rich, meditative, narratively loose but strangely cohesive experience. It’s about the tasks that fill up a person’s days, and the weight that some of the simplest tasks assume when we take a moment to stop and really see them.

So eventually, those mysterious things, the ones that Pierre is trying to do something with before they’re forgotten, feel like the accumulation of ordinary—or, well, ordinary for some of us anyway—things that define a life as much as the prized memories of outstanding events. All of it falls under the scrutiny of Pierre’s pen. And it’s as though the real testimony winds up being not the things Pierre writes but those that Nolot allows us to see unfold. There is an awful lot of talk about the past here, but the way the past is reconsidered is very much a present tense drama. Nolot is living it for us onscreen, doing as little as possible, which is to say exactly what it needed and nothing more. It’s a full, generous performance because it’s so un-forced, and because the camera is likewise so steady and unwavering. Many great filmmakers over the years have used the real, unbroken passage of time in interesting ways that usually heighten our corporeal experience of movie-watching, but Nolot’s use of it here is to shed light on the corporeal experience his own body is undertaking, a body that has so much memory written right there on its surface for us to see.