Bowen’s Cinematic

If there’s one thing about getting around on this planet that most filmmakers muck up more than sex, it’s money. A few years ago I was thrilled with the prospect of Friends with Money, but that picture, while at least acknowledging the last taboo, skirts it with a low-key storybook ending that effectively renders moot everything that’s come before. Nancy Meyers’ recent pictures, especially Something’s Gotta Give and The Holiday, are particularly loathsome examples of smug Hollywood economic condescension – with paradises where everyone’s a record producer, ad man, or trailer editor with homes apparently personally attended to by the editors of GQ, Better Homes and Gardens, Wired and Playboy.

Then there’s the typical art-house “indie” approach, equally out-there in the opposite way. Clichéd Hollywood pictures at least give you something to fantasize about; the generic art film presents a Hell defined by years of bad fiction, the kind of thing that Sullivan sought to make to elevate himself as a director – a film for the “little guy”. Which means that the picture in question is grim and humorless, and the characters, when they can muster a syllable or two, bicker and grunt and stew in their inchoate misery. These films miss something: the point that, even poor, people are always, endlessly, capable of distracting themselves, with in-jokes, with sex, with stories, with more than just smoking and booze, though that is certainly a part of it. Filmmakers, when they allow poverty to creep into their films at all, usually treat the poor as a rare, possibly dangerous, endangered species, the humanity, normally unintentionally, is denied.

I’m not sure I counted one laugh in Frozen River, a bleak, well-edited, story of two women driven to human smuggling to provide for their children. The picture is better than most in this vein, but writer-director Courtney Hunt misses how people handle extreme duress, she only gets the obvious notes. There’s no humor, no bullshitting, nothing’s idle – no moment exists for its own sake to tell us who these people are. Hunt puts us in a vice, effectively, but we know all we’re going to know about Frozen River in its first ten minutes, it’s the sort of picture that critics acclaim because most of them don’t know any better either. This is the kind of film a critic will scold a typical moviegoer for skipping, but why should the moviegoer pay to see a picture even worse, and considerably more boring, than reality?

Hunt is talented, there are moments, most notably a Christmas morning, that linger; but her film shows us how hard these character pieces are – the near impossibility in achieving that found object vibe that can allow a film to really get in your bones. Soderbergh’s King of the Hill did, and so did last year’s Chop Shop – partly because those pictures had the imagination and insight to acknowledge how their children might turn their situations into a game, and the ironic, unexpected exhilaration that comes from hitting bottom and not only surviving it, but thriving in it. Despite the differences in setting, Chop Shop and Frozen River are similar: both have something to do with the spiritual toll of survival, but Frozen River is too stifled and self-conscious, too well-meaning, and we never lose sight of the scheme that presides over the entire thing, most noticeably in the far-too-obvious opening passages.

Melissa Leo is strong and weathered as Ray – you can’t fake what she brings to the part, and she refreshingly doesn’t play to the audiences’ sympathy. I found Misty Upham’s Lila, Ray’s recruiter and partner, more interesting though, she, in a less blatant “Misery of the Lower Class” role, suggests a resignation, and a danger, that keeps us from getting a firm handle on her. Leo and Upham’s chemistry may be worth watching Frozen River once for – they get at an aspect of need even less explored in movies than everything we’ve already mentioned: poverty as a unifier beyond all races or gender. Hunt’s refusal to nail this particular element down distinguishes her from many of her contemporaries, she might just be a filmmaker who has lived a moment outside the movie theatre.

With so many movies going wrong in so many irritatingly pointless ways – usually in the service of whipping up some kind of pandering vanilla – The Wrestler is, refreshingly, a work of common sense. Darren Aronofsky’s new movie is the sort in which the titular hero, Randy “The Ram” Robinson (Mickey Rourke), gets it going with a considerably younger admirer in a public bathroom after a fight with a woman he actually cares for. This shouldn’t be noteworthy, but it is, this sort of action – a bit that humanizes The Ram without calling attention to itself, is the kind of moment that most pop movies omit, for fear of alienating us from their heroes. (By contrast, “indie” or some Oscar movies, numb us with one manufactured unpleasantness after another.) The obligatory do-gooder stuff is the real alienator.

Some have criticized The Wrestler as a promising character piece tethered to genre, in this case, the fallen-jock’s-one-last-stand-learn-something-along-the-way picture. But The Wrestler needs formula to contain it – the formula binds the intimate little vignettes – atoms – that exist as little movies in themselves (the true point of the movie) – and creates an exhilarating friction. Many character studies rub their ambitions and good intentions in your face, you want to give them an A on their report card and move on; genre pieces, meanwhile, can be inhumanely devoted to a formula that has become, by this point, ceremony. Watching a sports movie or a blood gushing action picture, you crave just one little human wrinkle – and seldom get it. Aronofsky and Rourke give you one after another, marrying clichéd genre discipline with a human curiosity – a willingness to pause and let something play. The result isn’t a “transcendence of genre”, that’s the kind of phrase (which I’m sure I’ve used) that reflects a critical hedging of bets, but a damn good genre movie. The Wrestler is essentially the first Rocky with a major actor and director, a callback to a decade when some pop films were allowed to reflect anxieties and pleasures and detour from the plots at hand in favor of funkier, less predictable, sometimes more revealing moods.

Much has been made of the differences of Mickey Rourke young and old – the voice with more than a tinge of innuendo versus the sandpaper sigh with more than a hint of regret, the coiled physical grace versus the slightly shambling, ironically beautiful lumber – but the most vital part of this actor has been constant: he always seems to have another, possibly better, movie playing in his head. Something’s always simmering in Rourke, ready to reach a boil at any given time, or possibly not, he might just be recalling a joke he heard at a bar a few days prior. Rourke, and this something that Neo-Brando and DeNiro wannabes such as Edward Norton and Ryan Gosling fail to grasp, has the command of effortlessness, a playful, amused-amusing spontaneity that, in his off work, can sink into self-congratulatory camp. You don’t watch a great, or even bad, Rourke performance and think of all the method huffing and puffing, you watch him and think of no one else. In his self-containment, his ability to load any line with three different meanings, Rourke recalls Newman, only with the danger and muddled demons of Brando. Rourke isn’t in Brando or Newman’s league (few are) but he’s a Brando with less Brando, not an actor chasing a working Joe, but a working Joe chasing an actor; which is actually closer to the typical American man anyway – no one’s like Brando, he was some sort of god; Rourke, as all great movie stars do, gives us a mythologized, idealized version of ourselves – in this case the fallen, fascinatingly scarred badass – with just enough recognizably real baggage to actually sell it.

Rourke is still, despite his bruises and rasps and, I assume, not quite successful surgeries, a legitimately commanding leading man, in a way more confident than ever (when he was young he was playing, and looking for, hurt, now he’s found it). The critics are a little off when they say that Ram earns sympathy by never asking for it – there’s a moment by the beach where he does just that – he earns sympathy by evading self-consciousness, and by never indulging in the sort of emasculation porn that kills most Hollywood versions of the struggling man (Newman pulled the same trick in Nobody’s Fool). Rourke allows a struggling man his casual glory and dignity, he’s been on both halves of the ladder, and his performance is full and imaginative enough to give us the best of both worlds: an everyman superstar. We sympathize with Mickey Rourke because he and Aronofsky don’t condescend toward us, and because Ram understands himself – the process of self-actualization that defines most movies has been pared away here – and in that self-understanding – that’s he’s a failure, a flake – there’s an authentic, cleansing grace – a minute happiness found in small pleasures and distractions: (touching) camaraderie with the other performers, a few beers, an action figure, a videogame, fiddling with his glasses, his hearing aide, his mind wandering as he walks, particularly as he rolls his luggage away – this picture captures the casual processes of warding off disappointment and loneliness, for as long they’ll be warded off.

I’m betting it’s the grace that attracted Aronofsky to the material. The heroes of his last three pictures – Pi, Requiem for a Dream, and The Fountain – grasped for relief; and, of those pictures, the only one that ended, somewhat, in success was The Fountain. The past films were edgy and desperate – and the cutting and staging – a mixture of MTV, Spike Lee, and seemingly every visually memorable movie made since the 1970s – could be showboat, but the methods got us to the characters’ frazzled planes, and probably reflected a similar compulsion in Aronofsky – the oldest monkey on the director’s back – “to get it all out” – a young director’s obsession with making something that isn’t just filler over a drink or a party. (And it’s this obsession that continually draws filmmakers to Christ parables – Jesus was the ultimate tortured artist who overcame doubt to deliver something lasting.)

Perhaps the strife while making The Fountain, and the undeserved nonevent that was that picture’s eventual release, quenched Aronofsky – he was ready for a character who had punched through the wall, survived, and was now over the turmoil that characterizes uncertain youth – whether they’re at the mercy of lunacy or drugs or, far more typical, mediocrity. Logically, the staging of The Wrestler is less hurried, less “fantastic” – it emulates the Ram’s blitzed, one thing at a time gait, with tracking shots emphasizing the moment to moment ritual of just getting from one place to another. The bouts in The Wrestler, and one of them is shockingly violent, are, very obviously, for Ram what the cure was for Tom in The Fountain, or the heroin for Harry and Marion in Requiem or God for Maximillian in Pi – an addictive drive for atonement. Aronofsky has made an auteur genre movie as well as a tribute to a star who should’ve done more, and he’s avoided self-importance because he never contorts the picture to meet a bunch of pre-approved critic/fanboy-proof needs. This is why most consciously 1970s-nostalgia/wannabe pictures don’t work – they’re all chic “hardcore”, fashion statements as shallow as most current Hollywood product, only with dirty brown lighting. (See Wonderland, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake and its sequel, and any one of a hundred IFC films.) Aronofsky’s made a picture critics like because they like Rourke’s own story and because it’s authentically irresistible, and he’s made a picture that frustrated day-shift, night-shift wrestling fans just might like too, and that’s the major feat of The Wrestler – it’s a genre picture for genre fans about the sort of people who flock to genre pictures most, and it gives them something they might not have even known they wanted: empathy.