16 Years Later, This Masterpiece With 98% on RT Is Still the Best Sports Drama Ever Made

16 years ago, Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler was released – a drama that tells the story of an aging athlete desperately trying to prolong his career in the ring.

Years later, The Wrestler remains an exemplary sports drama, as well as a movie that showed Darren Aronofsky to be ahead of his time.

The Wrestler Is a Deconstruction of Traditional Masculinity

The roar of the crowd, splashes of blood, a sweaty athlete finishing off his opponent with a graceful jump: it seems there is no more brutal sport than wrestling. Pumped-up men in tights pummel each other in the ring to the screams of excited spectators.

The fighters, who seem to be made of nothing but testosterone, are aggressive toward their opponents, aggressive toward the referee, aggressive even toward the spectators, but all of this is just part of a performance that requires acting.

In Aronofsky's film, the athletes have a nice chat in the locker room before the fight, sincerely supporting each other, and the main character, Randy "The Ram" Robinson, played by Mickey Rourke, is the antithesis of his athletic role outside the ring.

Barely holding back tears, awkwardly picking out a gift for his daughter, and shyly starting a conversation about her sexuality, Randy seems to be fighting the idea of masculinity much more successfully than his sparring partners.

While in conventional sports dramas the characters were willing to perform incredible feats through moral and willpower, Rourke's character is almost ready to give up, because there is nothing shameful in weakness and despair. Men cry, too, not from injuries sustained in the ring, but from broken hearts and their own mistakes.

The Wrestler Was Mickey Rourke's Triumphant Return to the Big Screen

Mickey Rourke's career began in the ring. Before becoming one of the most promising actors of the 80s, Rourke had been involved in boxing since childhood. Already a movie star, he returned to professional fighting, but was unable to achieve great success in either his acting or sports career.

And if in the late 90s Rourke could still boast of his participation in the film Thursday, then in the new millennium there was no place for the actor on the screen. The actor entered the 2000s with huge debts. Darren Aronofsky returned Rourke to the big screen, for which he repaid him with an excellent performance.

In Randy Robinson, it is easy to see the path of life of the actor himself, once the main favorite of the public, and now content with the days of long-gone glory of a loser. For Mickey Rourke's career, The Wrestler became a lifeline, and for Rourke himself, The Wrestler became the cornerstone on which all of the movie's magic rests.

Rourke's brilliant performance not only allowed him to return to the big screen, but was also recognized during awards season: a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Drama, and an Oscar nomination.

The Wrestler Was Definitely Ahead of Its Time

In the 2000s, the heyday of superheroes, movies about weak men were of little interest to the public. In 2008, Tony Stark was trying on his suit, Bruce Wayne was fighting universal evil with all his might, who cared about a man beaten by life, losing the battle against life itself?

It seems that Aronofsky realized that The Wrestler was ahead of its time, because 14 years later he returned with a similar story in The Whale. In both films, we see a self-destructive man desperately trying to improve his relationship with his teenage daughter. And the almost identical endings of The Wrestler and The Whale, in which the main characters literally rise into the air before their deaths, reinforce this idea.

And do we even need to mention how similar the career paths of Mickey Rourke and Brendan Fraser are? The former came out of Aronofsky's film with an Oscar nomination, while the latter went on to win the top prize.