March
17, 2000 | Early in Beyond the Mat, a documentary that contemplates
the phenomenon of professional wrestling as performance art, writer-director
Barry W. Blaustein fesses up: He's a die-hard aficionado of the head-banging,
face-smashing, body-slamming spectacle.
During
his childhood, Blaustein recalls in his eager voice-over, he devoted
countless hours to watching wrestling on TV, forever "mesmerized
by these images of strong guys taking matters into their own hands."
And even though he realized long ago that the matches are scripted and
the violence - well, OK, most of the violence - is choreographed,
his ardent enthusiasm remains undiminished. Indeed, you can't help getting
the impression that Blaustein - whose screenwriting credits include
The Nutty Professor and Coming to America - drove himself
to succeed in Hollywood only as a means to an end, so he could someday
make a movie that would enable him to hang out with the likes of Stone
Cold Steve Austin.
And
yet, to a surprising degree, Beyond the Mat emerges as something
appreciably more substantial than a fan's mash note. Blaustein devotes
relatively little time to actual in-the-ring mayhem, and offers only
fleeting interviews with other devotees of the "sport." Instead,
Blaustein strives for an up-close and personal approach, focusing on
a handful of individual wrestlers - including superstars, wannabes and
a couple of flickering burn-outs - as he seeks a definitive answer to
his own provocative question: "What kind of man bashes another
man's skull into a ring post for a living?"
Throughout
five years of on-again, off-again production, Blaustein gained unprecedented
access to the inner workings of the World Wrestling Federation. He's
even a witness at creation, so to speak, while WWF honcho Vince McMahon
- a self-aggrandizing dynamo who occasionally gets into the ring himself
- manufactures a new identity for ex-football player Darren Drozdov:
"Since you are able to regurgitate on command, it seems logical
that your name should be... Puke!" Blaustein also captures
a weirdly sweet backstage moment as Mick Foley, decked out in his creepy-goofy
Mankind mask, introduces his two small children to The Rock, an amiable
fellow who jokes with the children. Later in the evening, during a mega-hyped
pay-per-view match-up, the kids and their mother watch in bug-eyed horror
while The Rock repeatedly smacks Foley over the head with a metal folding
chair.
Foley
may fret over the example he's setting for his children, but his moral
qualms are not nearly as distressing as the sad story of Jake "The
Snake" Roberts, a former WWF luminary who's now reduced to grappling
for dollars on the independent circuit. A middle-aged, gone-to-seed
crack addict who can barely communicate with his estranged adult daughter,
Roberts is something of a fallen hero in Blaustein's eyes. But Roberts
takes a far less charitable view of his condition: "I do not feel
sorry for myself," he confides to the camera. "I asked for
everything I got."