The Wrestler [2008] Movie Reviews on CinemaClock

There are so many good things to say about this movie. The production values, the directing, and the acting are simply out of this world. The film grain is very low, and this gives it the effect of a documentary, perhaps even puts it in a class of films that mirror the class of wrestlers among whom Randy has fallen. Such wrestling troupes are known across Canada and America and are a version of carnivale. What goes into this activity, the ways that it IS real, comes out with striking clarity, but more clear than anything else are the ways that it both honors and impoverishes the self. And this should be kept in mind: with honor, goes belonging; with not-belonging goes shame. So it isn’t even a question of him (or any of us) being willing to do the work necessary to change – others simply aren’t interested in making another space on what Pierre Bourdieu calls the new field. That is why the most powerful moment for me in the film is when Randy says “This is where I belong. ” It struck a chord with a basic moral principle: that the purpose of each day of our lives is to make the world that we must live within. There is no changing one’s world. Nowhere else are you wanted, nowhere is there a space for you. And you may no longer be capable of the sorts of changes demanded, so much have you also made yourself into a final product. It made me think of Michael Moore’s ROGER AND ME – all those seniors working at MacDonald’s in Flint Michigan with hunched backs and arthritis from 27 years of screwing glove compartments onto a dashboard. No wonder we have (or used to have) pensions. At any event, it is by far my favorite film of the year, well ahead of even The Reader, which I loved. Viewers might wonder whether Randy “lived” or “died” at the end – all I can tell you is this: there is more than one way to die and he chose to risk doing it in a moment, rather than letting it drag on for years. It is written in ethics that we get to make choices for a very long time, but eventually we reach a point when our previous choices begin to choose for us. We cannot run away from our moral history because that is what we are. So, for me at least, this film has a lot to say about things that have nothing to do with wrestling.