There’s a lot more to wrestlers than their crazy super hero names, shiny neon-colored tights and over-bulged muscles. Or at least there is to Randy the Ram Robinson, the emotionally complex “Wrestler.”
Randy’s a past-his-prime wrestler who hasn’t moved on. He visits the hair salon to maintain his shoulder length long blonde hair, basks in the fluorescent light of tanning beds to keep up his golden tan, and continues pulling on those neon green tights to keep going back in the ring. Just as the little plastic Randy the Ram action figure representing his glamorous alter ego doesn’t fit in with the old beat-up van that makes do as his home when he doesn’t make the payment on his trailer, Randy doesn’t fit into the real world.
The only world he knows and loves is wrestling. While the matches are all coordinated in advance down to each minute step, it doesn’t mean the fighting’s not real – or brutal making for a few very hard-to-watch scenes. One sequence in particular involving staples and barbed wire is not for the faint of heart. Then again it turns out to be too much for Randy too who has a heart attack that forces him to give up wrestling.
At this point the film becomes more interesting and complex because we’re brought more into Randy’s life. We see he lives alone in a messy, out-dated trailer where he plops into his bed with his clothes on and places his hearing aides on the nightstand. His only entertainment is playing wrestling video games staring his own alter ego on the old-school Nintendo system from the ‘90s with the neighbor kid.
The only people in his life he cares about are the luke-warm stripper he tries to befriend and his long-lost daughter. He’s come to know Cassidy (Marisa Tomei) from frequenting the strip club she works at, but she never quite warms up to him all the way. She distances herself not wanting to date a customer, but they’re brought together because Cassidy is past her prime too. She wants to move on to a better life with her young son but is stuck in the strip club being passed over for the much younger girls. “’90s suck!” they shout while dancing over the more familiar ‘80s music of their glory days.
One who has a harder time warming up is his daughter Stephanie (Evan Rachel Wood). They have the potential to make up and start new again – beautifully symbolized by them strolling through the old, torn-down buildings along the New Jersey shoreline they used to visit years ago. It’s a little hard to fully understand their relationship, however, because the film doesn’t go into their background. Why hasn’t he been around her so long? What did he do to hurt her so badly? In a poignant and sorrowful scene, he tells her he’s “a broken-down piece of meat” and doesn’t deserve her. But why?
Eventually, his self-destructive ways give in and he ends up hurting Cassidy and Stephanie once he starts connecting with them. Is that just the way he is – a narcissist who’s just absorbed in his own little world of wrestling? Or was he pushed there to his isolated world by the apathetic people around him that don’t reciprocate his feelings?
After all, we do see how he gets pushed to the breaking point from a series of rude customers at the deli he must work at to make ends meet after he had to quit wrestling. At first Randy doesn’t seem like he’s going to acclimate to his new deduced job. Depicted very cleverly, the camera tracks Randy from behind as he walks down the hall to the deli amid the familiar sounds of the roars and cheers of the wrestling crowd as he’s about to enter a match. Just as he would rip the curtain open to step into the match, he rips open the curtain into the deli – only now the rooting and cheering abruptly stops. This is Randy’s new life whether he likes it or not.
To much surprise, Randy does come to like it. He’s cutely content calling off the numbers of the customers waiting in queue, serving up their half pounds of potato salad and pieces of chicken breast, and making friendly, cheeky conversations with his customers. Yet, just as his wrestling days came to a halt, so did his deli days because of a couple of annoying, cluelessly rude customers who pushed him to his limits.
On the one hand, we want to tell Randy to grow up and to move on. Especially, in the sad scene where he gathers with some other washed up D-List celebrities in a local community building to sign autographs for a few sole fans, sell worthless memorabilia, to snap pictures with fans on junky Polaroid cameras.
But then again, Randy’s only happy wrestling and his life revolves around it. In fact, for much of the film’s opening the camera tracks Randy from behind as if his whole life is a lead-up into a match. And why shouldn’t it be? Life just rejects him, and he’s forced to just reject it right back. Even when people call him Robin, his real name, he adamantly rejects it by taking on the new name he gave himself for the wrestling world. It’s a constant tug of war between the real world rejecting him and him rejecting the real world. But, as he tells Cassidy, the only place he gets hurt is outside of the ring. So “The Wrestler” tells us that basically you’re on your own in this world so just do what makes you happy.
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