MOVIES

Rourke, Van Damme find redemption on-screen

Once written off, both actors deliver superb performance in startlingly candid self-portraits.

By Chris Garcia
AMERICAN-STATESMAN FILM WRITER
Thursday, December 04, 2008

Mickey Rourke mutters a great line in "The Wrestler," the new Darren Aronofsky drama that's garnering heaps of well-placed encomiums, mostly on the basis of Rourke's uncharacteristically heartsick performance. His character, a professional wrestler named Randy "The Ram" Robinson, opens up to his estranged daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) in stark confessional style: "I'm an old, broken-down piece of meat," he says, lips quivering, eyes drizzling. "And I'm alone."

It's a whopping "ouch" moment in a whopping "ouch" of a movie — a portrait of the artist as a desperate, washed-up loser. Because its protagonist's story so unflinchingly mirrors the true story of the actor playing him, "The Wrestler," opening early next year in Austin, is a strange and uncomfortable movie, obliquely autobiographical and awkwardly soul-baring.

Odder yet is that another excellent new film, "JCVD," does something uncannily similar: merging its star's somewhat tragic real-life story with its character's story. But in "JCVD" — or Jean-Claude Van Damme — the faded action star plays himself in a fictional narrative that allows Van Damme considerable room for merciless introspection. "JCVD," running at the Alamo Village, works on multiple meta levels, and you've never seen the star, famed for his devastating split-kick, so authentic or so spectacularly good. Except for laying out Dolph Lundgren, it's the best thing he's ever done on screen.

Rourke is also superb in "The Wrestler" — Oscar buzz wreathes his performance — and viewers are hailing both actors' comebacks as more than dignified homecomings, but as career-saving resurrections. One thinks of Gloria Swanson in "Sunset Boulevard." Like her, Rourke and Van Damme are fizzled former superstars making stunning returns in melancholy films streaked with autobiographical allusions. Like her, they flush their former vanity for ego-gulping realism.

Rourke's The Ram was a professional-wrestling deity in the 1980s, just as Rourke the actor was easing into stardom during that decade, with exceptional performances in exceptional films: "Diner," "Pope of Greenwich Village," "Body Heat," "Barfly."

Age, poor choices and personal tragedies will catch up to you, and Rourke smothered his career in a series of wretched B junk before publicly plunging off the deep-end. If The Ram doesn't lose his marbles, he does, 20 years on, lose his fame, family and fortune. He struggles to pay rent on a rust-bucket trailer and spends free time at a strip club. Riddled with battle scars, creaky and sore, The Ram groans on, a relic who takes on guys half his age in bloody, choreographed bouts.

Rourke's crushed and reconstructed face resembles a malformed Mount Rushmore bust. It's puffy in odd places and juts with cubist planes. The Ram wears a hearing aid, yet gropes for the old glitter by bleaching his heavy-metal mane and using a tanning booth, which gives his ripped musculature an orangey Stretch Armstrong sheen. The Ram is the kind of glamorless role Charlize Theron does for kicks.

If Van Damme doesn't go as far in upending his persona in the Belgian-made "JCVD" — he is, after all, playing himself, still in great shape and snazzily dressed — he does go further spilling his guts. He openly confesses the welter of mistakes — from divorces and custody battles, to drug addiction and cruddy movies — that brought him to the brink as an industry laughingstock.

In the film's piece de resistance, Van Damme sits and faces the camera for a confession disguised as a "Hamlet"-esque soliloquy that's captured in a mesmerizing seven-minute single take. He pierces the fourth wall, speaking to us in his native French, saying things like, "This movie is for me" and "I promised you in return, and I haven't delivered it."

Like Rourke in the most emotional moments in "The Wrestler," Van Damme here is sweat-soaked and teary-eyed. In fact, blood, sweat and tears are great communicators in the movies, which could raise suspicions of self-pitying motives. Both actors perform in growly minimalist modes, as if chastened by former garish gestures that led to their downfalls. And the characters endure both physical and verbal abuse that queasily plays like self-flagellation, penitence for old sins.

It's hard to tell what it really means. Actorly courage? Desperation? Salvation?

Whatever it is, the actors come off so upfront and honest, embodying their films so exquisitely, that if you're unwilling to respond with empathy, you can certainly proffer respect.

Just look at these battered souls. They are ragged and worn. They practically pant with existential exhaustion. They resemble supplicants for the deepest redemptions of art and of life. They look vaguely frightened. They look, indeed, as if they are acting for their very lives.

cgarcia@statesman.com; 445-3649