There is only one movie that could have kept me from watching The Wrestler today, and it just so happened that Netflix was streaming that exact film while I was browsing. Of course, once you watch JCVD, you might as well watch The Wrestler, since they deal with actors who slipped out of the "big time" and both came back last year in very different ways.
Let's deal with the one less people have seen, and appropriately the first one I watched: JCVD
For anyone who doesn't know what the title stands for (or who stars in the movie), that would be Jean-Claude Van Damme, the "Muscles from Brussels" and frequenter of direct to video fare for the last ten years or so. The film had limited release here in the U.S. and while many of us planned on seeing it, JCVD slipped by and became a "catch it on video".
If you don't have Netflix, you can watch JCVD starting next week, when it hits dvd and Blu Ray, and I highly recommend it. It's rare that an action star would be so willing to look at himself critically and then put it out there for the world to see, so I give serious points to Van Damme for being such a good sport. From the opening - one continuous action shot - where Jean-Claude gets winded and complains to a bored director "Look, I'm 47. I can't do stuff like this anymore" to the moment where he's literally lifted above the set and addresses the audience to the tongue in cheek ending, Van Damme never takes himself too seriously.
In JCVD, the title's namesake is broke, fighting a losing custody battle, and considering giving up acting for no-talent directors and money grubbing agents in order to go back to Belgium and start over. How much of that reflects Van Damme's actual life is irrelevant considering the strange twists and turns of this self reflexive parody. That being said, it's not exactly the comedy you'd expect.
The movie itself is like a mix of Adaptation, My Name is Bruce, and Dog Day Afternoon with a narrative structure borrowed liberally from Christopher Nolan's early work. And somehow it works, even though the film openly defies what audiences would expect from Jean-Claude Van Damme. It's easily the best thing I've seen him do and maybe it marks a career shift for the aging action star.
One note: the Netflix streaming version is partially dubbed. JCVD is presented partially in english and partially in French, and will be easy to notice because Van Damme does not dub his own voice (for some reason) in this version. Despite this distraction, the movie still works and I look forward to seeing it un-dubbed.
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I couldn't in good conscience watch Jean-Claude Van Damme address his (at times literal) fall from grace without the figurative version Mickey Rourke deals with in The Wrestler, so I went ahead and played them back to back. The two films make for an interesting double feature, particularly since one so openly addresses our conceptions of an actor and the other merely reinforces assumptions about one.
This is not to say The Wrestler is making things up about Mickey Rourke, but I certainly don't think he's playing himself (or a version of himself). Randy "The Ram" is a character, perhaps one with personal touchstones for Rourke, but he may have been given a raw deal by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. I don't think that Rourke was "not acting" in The Wrestler, however much we may like to draw parallels between Mickey and "The Ram". Nothing personal to Sean Penn, whose win for Milk I have not seen yet.
I've been a fan or Darren Aronofsky since Pi, so watching The Wrestler came without much trepidation. Still, I was surprised by how much of a shift it was for Aronofsky as a director. Pi, Requiem for a Dream, and The Fountain are heavily conceptually heavy films that rely on all sorts of editing tricks and in-camera effects. The Wrestler, on the other hand, has a documentary feel to it, right down to the way the camera frequently just "follows" Randy around*. The film could easily be read as a companion piece to Barry Blaustein's Beyond the Mat, which has to be on some level an inspiration for this film.
The Wrestler is harder to watch than JCVD but it's already having an impact after finishing the film. While I look forward to watching both again and highly recommend each film, I sense The Wrestler will be the one I return to most often.
Nevertheless, enjoy both movies and if you have time, double them up. It's an interesting experience to say the least.
*That in itself is an interesting juxtaposition to JCVD, which is quite the opposite: the lighting is high-key to the point that many characters and sets seem to "glow" and the editing is part of the trickery within what we think we're seeing vs what's actually happening (which is part of why I'm steering clear of the plot of JCVD).
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