The Wrestler

What an amazing film, poignant story, actor-driven ... mesmerizing ... sort of like watch a train wreck in slow motion, and unexpectedly seeing survivors.

Mickey Rourke is at the top of his form, and so is Marisa Tomei.

Both are at the end of the road, so to speak, for their respective "careers" - he, a wrestler, and she, a stripper.

Both struggle alone - she has a young son for whom she's working hard and hopes to go to school soon, and he, a broken relationship with an adult daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) for whom he's missed too many birthdays. She doesn't want to see him any more.

His effort to reach out is poignant, to say the least. And for a few moments, it works. In one of the most touching scenes I've ever seen, the two of them are walking through an abandoned amusement park on the boardwalk. He's walking toward the camera, she following behind, and then, with quickened pace, she catches up and loops her arm through her father's arm and leans her head on his shoulder.

His daughter's heart is reachable, but she knows the terrain of her father's heart, too.

At the end of the career road, he doesn't want to be alone; she says, "You just want someone to take care of you." In the end, he blows it again - did we expect anything else? Perhaps in a fairy tale, but a tiger doesn't change it stripes, and neither does Randy "The Ram" Robinson.

A heart attack finishes him. No more wrestling, so he ups his hours at the local grocery store, taking a weekend job in the deli. If there's ever been a better portrait of the humiliation of the worker, I've yet to see it. He gives it his best shot, but in the end, he can't take the humiliation, so he quits, and quits with style - his pride intact. I'm not gonna take this any more.

Meanwhile, at a local strip club, he's formed a "relationship" with an aging stripper. For her, he's a customer, but he'd like it to be more, and, as we discover, so would she.

In one of the best plot devices I've seen, they're like two ships passing in the night - needing love and companionship, but unable to connect, unable to be anything else then what they're doing. Are they trapped? Sort of! But they are who and what they are - a combination of choice and circumstance.

Both end up rebuffing one another - she at her work when he asks her for something more, and he, when he decides against doctor's orders, to enter the ring once again - she left work early to stop him before he wrestles, prepared to tell him, "Yes," but he enters the ring instead.

This story is about redemption - not the kind we'd like to see, what with a "they lived happily ever after" - but something simpler, and more profound at the same time - grace within the boundaries of our life; mostly a life accidental, a life of mistakes and short-sighted decisions, but it's the only life we've got.

Theologically, I ask, Where's God?

The film suggests (in a purely secular fashion) that God is found where we are, not where we're supposed to be, and likely, there is no "supposed to be" - there is only, Where we are! And that's the hope we see at the end - God with Randy "The Ram" in the ring, and with Cassidy in the stip club.

This is terrific film in all regards ... sad, but not a tear-jerker. A bit violent, that's for sure, as we get a picture of the professional wrestler playing all the American legion halls - wherever they can, for the love of the game, and whatever money they can make. Some of the scenes are "rather graphic," but don't let that deter you. This is a story worth knowing and a film worth seeing.

Gran Torino

“Gran Torino,” directed by and starring Clint Eastwood and a host of unknowns (we will be seeing more of them) portraying the Hmong family next door and the members of a Hmong gang, is a remarkable story and a very good film.

It’s a story about redemption!

Filmed in the Detroit area, it was fun for me (having lived there 16 years) to see the homes and streets so typical of this workingman’s city, and a few remarks about the cold weather uttered by Walt (Eastwood) – weather that ought to keep the foreigners out.

Which brings me to the heart of the story: Walt is a retired autoworker who put the steering column into his pride and joy, a mint-condition, 1972 Gran Torino. His is the story of Detroit – the auto industry waning, the population flux overwhelming, and the world Walt knew is no more – he’s a stranger in a strange land, right in his own neighborhood.

His wife of many years died, his children don’t understand him, and he sits on his porch, guns ready, drinking gallons of beer and smoking, grumbling and mumbling to himself about the “slopes” next door and the general condition of the world he no longer understands.

The story is really very funny much of the time as the script unloads virtually ever racial and ethnic slur in the American vocabulary (with the exception of the “n” word, for which I was grateful). Walt doesn’t know how to talk about anyone different than him other than in crude ways. Even his barber who’s been cutting his hair for years is greeted with a string of ethnic epithets and curses, and gladly returned by the barber. As Eastwood delivers these lines, the audience is heartily laughing, though guardedly, I noticed.

As Eastwood grudgingly gets to know the family next door, and grumpily befriends the young man, they both go to the barber shop where Eastwood is going to school him in the fine art of man-talk. It’s comedic energy reminded me of the scene in “The Bird Cage,” when Robin Williams tries to teach Nathan Lane how to walk like a man. Enough said. It’s great and full of belly laughs.

But Eastwood is doing more than an Archie Bunker routine; Eastwood captures the alienation of an American workingman who sees his world fading away. It’s a lonely, angry, time.

The Hmong family next door and their traditions is a highlight of the film – there are other cultures and other worlds, and these days, the borders between are growing thin. What will we do?

Religion plays an interesting role here. Fr. Janovich (Cristopher Carley) is young and “just-outta-priest-school” befriended by Walt’s wife in her dying days. She made the young priest promise to get Walt to confession, and he works at it with considerable pastoral skill. Though collared and liturgically garbed some of the time, much of time the young priest is dressed casually. Does this young priest represent a new world as well?

Being a pastor myself, I’m sensitive to the stereotypes that mostly show up on the tube and the silver screen – no stereotypes here – a well-done job by the writers and Eastood.

The most striking feature of the story is the ending, and I won’t give it away, other than to say it’s a real surprise – a moment of redemption and love, and as every religion knows, redemption and love are costly! But the price is worth it!

An entertaining film with a very good story – the price of seeing this film is worth it.