Short Takes
THE WRESTLER By any rights, the last word on the lameness of '80s nostalgia should be Randy "The Ram" Robinson, an aging grappler for whom the good times ended around the same time as Cheers. Still working the folding-chair circuit with a bum ticker and a Whitesnake hairdo, Randy the Ram's reduced to riding around with a cache of hair-metal cassettes and playing his Leisure Suit Larry-era videogame with unimpressed kids in his trailer park. The triumph of Mickey Rourke's performance is that Randy earns our sympathy and respect, without pleading for pity like a Willy Loman in Lycra. Even when The Ram is befriending small children or awkwardly courting his beyond-estranged daughter (Evan Rachel Wood), Rourke's acting is anchored in precise physical detail and ingratiatingly humble. He realizes the character is funny—watch him put on reading glasses to affix the skin-cutting tools of the warrior's trade—but he insists we don't take the man as a joke, even if he nearly kills himself night after night for our amusement. Shot with hand-held fly-on-the-wall scrutiny by Maryse Alberti, the movie was directed with uncharacteristic straight-forwardness by Darren Aronofsky, who must've realized what a good script he had: The screenplay by former Onion editor Robert D. Siegel mines the fleabag wrestling milieu for persuasive anecdotes, gently kidded absurdity and appealing camaraderie. This is the rare sports movie without a villain in the ring—the good guys and bad guys are all on the same side, against the wolf at the door outside, and the film views its scrappers and strippers (represented by an excellent Marisa Tomei, pursuing a commendable policy of mid-career nudity) as decent people as beholden to a work ethic as any clock-puncher. Efforts to make Randy's story a kind of passion play or tragedy don't really pan out: this is the story of a man who figures out what he's good at, and follows it to the mat without shame. But Rourke makes it a match to remember. His weary-lion presence brings glory even to the hair-metal on the soundtrack, turning the opening siren-wail of "Sweet Child o' Mine" into a fanfare for the common man. —Jim Ridley (Opens Friday)
STILL LIFE The preeminent cine-chronicler of contemporary China, Jia Zhangke returns with his fifth feature, an eccentric guided tour of post-apocalyptic Fengjie—the ancient river city largely flooded and partially rebuilt several years ago as part of the monumental Three Gorges Hydro project. But the movie is also an open-ended progress report. There are two protagonists and a pair of parallel narratives. In one, a stolid miner (Han Sanming) comes downriver in search of the bought wife who left him 16 years before and the daughter whom he's never seen. In the other, a young nurse (Zhao Tao) arrives in Fengjie to look for a husband who has been too busy making his fortune to stay in touch. Much of Still Life is simply devoted to these characters as they wend their respective ways through Fengjie's eerily half-demolished (or half-built) neighborhoods. Deconstruction would seem to be Fengjie's main industry: Old buildings are blown up, workers are sometimes obliged to remove unwilling tenants by force, and job-related injuries are rife. Without unduly belaboring the point, Jia suggests a pervasive, free-floating corruption. Everything is for sale. Money trumps all. But what's striking about Still Life is its micro-analytical curiosity: Judgment seems suspended—like the bridge that magically lights up over the Yangtze or the unlikely tightrope walker glimpsed in the movie's last shot. In Mandarin with subtitles. —J. Hoberman (Screens 7 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 28 at Sarratt, free and open to the public; Ling Hon Lam, Vanderbilt assistant professor of East Asian studies, will introduce the film)
THE EDGE OF HEAVEN Fatih Akin's The Edge of Heaven wears current events on its sleeve, feeling out the state of German-Turkish relationships as the former Ottomans clean house for E.U. membership, and the demographic earthquake of 70 million Muslims waits at Europe's door. Examining a Europe whose increasingly porous borders have drastically undermined a long-standing homogeneity is very much at the center of excellent recent work by such divergent sensibilities as Austria's Ulrich Seidl (Import/Export) and Britain's Shane Meadows (Somers Town). Both films still await a proper U.S. release date, while writer-director Akin once again secures distribution (as he did for his punk-posturing 2004 Head-On) with pseudo-provocations and a superficially deceptive simulacra of Art. Edge of Heaven ups the ambition: Its screenplay is a Dickensian network of happenstance, serving to intertwine six characters of different ages, nationalities and castes. Three parent-child sets fracture, then reconcile/recombine. This expression of growth-through-trauma mostly involves actors hugging and making wistful "older and wiser" expressions while looking into the middle distance. (Everyone gets along. That the Turks believe in a different God from the Germans, and actually believe at that, is apparently not a pressing concern.) If the united Europe aspires to compete with America globally, this is good news—they've found their own multiculti Paul Haggis! In English, German and Turkish with subtitles. —Nick Pinkerton (Runs Through Jan. 25 at The Belcourt; the 7 p.m. screening Jan. 21 will be followed by a discussion led by Mert Karakas, president of Vanderbilt's Turkish Students Association)
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