The Wrestler

After The Reader, for which Kate Winslet won Best Actress at the Golden Globes, The Wrestler, for which Micky Rourke got the Best Actor gong is a fairly radical change of mood, subject matter and tone.

The film tells the story of an aging wrestler, Randy 'The Ram' Robinson. He had been a star in the late 1980s, but in the film he's reduced to making a living fighting living alone in a mobile home on a run-down trailer park, his health failing, alienated from his family, and forced to work in a supermarket during the week to make ends meet.

After a heart attack, he gives up wrestling on doctor's orders, but, finding life as a supermarket worker unbearably dull, and after a failed attempt at reconciliation with his estranged daughter, he gets back in the ring for one last time - for a 're-match' with the (amusingly named) Ayatollah. It doesn't sound like much of a premise for a film, you might think. Hasn't the 'aging sporting hero coming back for one last shot at glory' been done plenty times before? And with sports that are actually, well, sports, and not just hi-energy acting?

That may be true, but I loved this film. Not least because the very absurdity of Randy's world - the nerdy fans, the matches fought out in down-at-heel sports arenas, the sheer brutality of the contests (if the film is to be believed, wrestling may be a fake and fixed, but the injuries are quite real). It lends a certain tragic ring to his desire to get back into the ring, and the fact that this is the world he feels so lost without.

Other good points? The film makes surprisingly good use of a hoary old movie cliche, the stripper-with-a-heart. Randy's on-off love interest with Pam (stage-name Cassidy) works well, not least because of the remarkable similarities of their working worlds. There is an amusing moment where she, while inspecting his war-wounds, starts quoting lines from The Passion of the Christ at him. This viewer at least, who cared little for Mel Gibson's torture-porn masquerading as religious allegory, likes to think it was intended as a subtle dig.)

Of the films I've seen this year, this is the first which I would unreservedly recommend you all go see.