The Wrestler: please tell me that NES game is real...

It's always very powerful to play audio of something in a person's head over an otherwise bland scene. When Mickey Roarke walks thorugh the grocery store warehouse toward the deli, and we follow behind him listening to the roar of the crowds that we know to be from his many hundreds of wrestling matches, there's a heroism in him that we can connect to, and that he has to work here, and can't spend the rest of his life being a hero to thousands, is really very sad.

Or can he? Live as a wrestler and so die as a wrestler? We spend a lot of this film following him as if he were on his way out to the ring, even though he's just heading to his landlord's, or shopping for supplies, or jogging through the lonely woods. It seems that when he's alone, he is perpetually in his hulking persona. It's only when he's with his lovely daughter (Evan Rachel Wood looks very different with dark hair), or his beautiful near-girlfriend (Marisa Tomei is so beautiful all the time!) that we see that he isn't always the taught-muscled Ram, because he has a connection to these people that's so brittle it could snap at any second. I often think about that idea: what is it like for a badass warrior to be tender with those he loves? Does he accidentally hurt them sometimes? How do they reconcile that? The Wrestler doesn't deal with that completely dead-on, but it works a little with such questions. And what it does is very... freeing to watch. I almost feel like the movie poster for this film could have been that shot in Disney's Beauty and the Beast where the tiny hand of Belle is held by the gargantuan paw of The Beast. Not really, but ya know.