I'm a guy from New Jersey who loves comedy and was a teenager in the 1990s so it's obvious I am a Kevin Smith fanatic. To me, specifically the Jersey Trilogy (Clerks, Mall Rats, Chasing Amy) perfectly captured what it was like to be a young person person of my hood just trying to figure it all out ( and to sprinkle that message with dick and fart jokes certainly got my attention). Though his later films don't always hit me on the same level as the others, I'll still catch anything Smith does. Still, it has been a long while since I've connected to a story out of the Garden State. That is, until I saw The Wrestler.
In every review I've read or heard, every critic talks about Mickey Rourke's brilliant performance and the resurrection of Mickey Rourke. This is absolutely 100% true (though I thought the guy came back almost 4 years ago in Sin City and Hollywood comebacks confuse me in general anyway). What nobody seemed to mention though is the fact that NO MOVIE EVER has captured my beloved state the way The Wrestler has. Not only does Bruce contribute a brilliant track to it, but this movie really is the cinematic version of a Springsteen song (I guess making Kevin Smith Jon Bon Jovi, which is not a bad thing at all). Oddly enough, director Darren Aronofsky grew up in Brooklyn and although many of us Jersey-ites come from or have family from Brooklyn, we would never expect someone from there to perfectly capture our little universe. The ONE thing in the movie that bothered me is that Marisa Tomei's character wanted to move from Elizabeth to Trenton, simply because the schools are better. If you're from a hundred miles outside of Trenton you know this is ridiculous because I am sorry, but the once shining city and current state capital is, with a few exceptions (like the burger joint Rossi's), is a total dump. A lot of Trenton kids are bussed to Hamilton schools (where my mom lives). Trenton is so bad that during gang initiation week, Hamilton residents are urged to stay inside as aspiring members are ordered to murder people. If this lady is trying to escape Elizabeth for some sort of paradise in Trenton, she's a mental patient and unfit to be a mother.
Everything else in The Wrestler is 100% spot on. It showed a New Jersey that was rarely if ever shown on The Sopranos. It showed the trailer parks, just out of reach from the McMansions. It showed the VFW halls and 'roid gyms where the non-WWE wrestlers can be found. Like the Sopranos, it showed Asbury Park, but it showed it in a truer light: as a beauty that once was that might be once again.
The Wrestler also had characters that I know. For example, I know guys eerily similar to Mickey Rourke's character, Randy "The Ram" Robinson. One guy is in a profession quite similar to The Ram's. When I knew him, his day job was doing random moving gigs and he had simple living conditions and a girlfriend that I was certain was only around to take advantage of him. He also might have been "special." Regardless, he was a gentle giant who it seemed only really fit in when he was in his world, on the stage. Aside from him, when I was a bartender (and at a real bar, not one of these fancy Manhattan places), I came across many men who were well past their glory days but somehow were able to relive them night after night on that bar stool. It was sad because you could see that they had been beat around by life- but when they told their war stories you still saw something in them.
I also knew Tomei's character, Cassidey the stripper. This woman was beautiful, sexy, smart and just amazing. I fell in love with her every time I saw her. But she was 40 and I somehow sensed that she felt like she was stuck and her days using her body were coming to an end. Her heyday was the 1980s and the 80s were long gone. Much like Asbury Park yes, she had seen better days, but there was still beauty to be seen. On top of that, she had a child to worry about at home and I could see balancing her two worlds was tiring, to say the least. I think a lot about her and hope that she hasn't given up the good fight.
At the end of the film, Springsteen's The Wrestler plays over the credits. It's lyrics are beautiful but realistic and, combined with the content of the movie, it hits hard. When Bruce sings, "These things that have comforted me, I drive away/This place that is my home I cannot stay/My only faith's in the broken bones and bruises I display," he's not describing a happy ending. All of the characters I've met over the years, I am not sure what there ending will be, but here's to hoping that, like The Ram, they find their glory again, even if it's just one more time.
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