If You've Ever Seen a One-Trick Pony than You've Seen Me

The Wrestler(Aronofsky, 2008)

Mickey Rourke’s character is the heart and soul of Darren Aronofsky’s film, and without a superb performance by Rourke the film would have been a total failure. Fortunately, Rourke is spectacularly heartbreaking in the lead role. As a character study or actor spotlight, I think the film achieves a great deal, even if some of the supporting performances are less than remarkable. For instance, the scenes between Randy the Ram (Rourke) and his daughter Stephanie (Evan Rachel Wood) do their part to add to the general tone of the film, but they do so through quantity rather than quality. The tension between Randy and his daughter adds to the sum of his misfortunes and loneliness, but the scenes themselves are pretty forgettable. Wood doesn’t add much to a fairly flat role. Marisa Tomei is good as Cassidy/Pam, the lovable stripper who becomes Randy’s only possible salvation.

And while the comparison the film sets up between them—both, having sacrificed their bodies to the entertainment industry, were treated like pieces of meat and then cast aside—is quite obvious, it works well and doesn’t seem too belabored. (The possible exception is the scene in which Cassidy discusses The Passion of the Christ and its portrayal of Christ being beaten. But as this is a brief moment, I’ll forgive its lack of subtlety.) The treatment of bodies as meat is made even more obvious when The Ram takes a job as a butcher at a grocery store deli. Again, the potential for heavy-handedness abounds here, but Rourke is so good in the role that the scenes behind the deli counter are quite fun. I particularly loved the use of sound here: as Randy walks through the halls of the grocery store about to emerge behind the counter for the first time, we hear traces of the crowd at a wrestling match cheering for The Ram. Though the reduction of people to sheer bodies and pieces of meat is pretty clear throughout the film, the cinematography and sound editing here nicely draw attention to this theme by stylistically enhancing the parallel between The Ram’s wrestling career and his new job as butcher. While this could have come off as insulting to the viewer’s intelligence, I think Aronofsky pulls it off well.

Overall, the formal and stylistic elements of the film aren’t anything special, but the acting is superb and the absence of much formal innovation allows the film to succeed at what it sets out to do without turning into a fashionably obvious piece of fluff.

Rating: 4/5

Who wants to be a 'millonaire'?

Slumdog Millionaire (Boyle, 2008)

This is a film that I’ll probably have to watch again to assess fairly. On the first viewing I was utterly captivated by the editing and cinematography, so much so that I didn’t even mind the unnecessarily cheesy emphasis on destiny (“it is written”), which would have made me gag in any other film. I did think it took away from what would have otherwise been an interesting commentary on different forms of knowledge and a privileging of the experiential knowledge of the poor over the type of knowledge sanctioned by and passed on through formal education. It’s highly possible, then, that on a second viewing I will be more frustrated by the film’s unrealized potential. For now, though, I think it’s nicely crafted and quite captivating. In fact, the film is oddly fun, considering its unyielding portrayal of life in the slums.

Rating: 4.5/5