The Wrestler
Friday, 7:00pm, Culbreth
Director: Darren Aronofsky
Writer: Robert D. Siegel
Cinematographer: Maryse Alberti
Cast: Mickey Rourke, Marissa Tomei, Evan Rachel Wood
Running Time: 105 minutes
Over the course of three films (Pi, Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain), Darren Aronofosky has become a singularly divisive young American director; always bold, his untamable sense of bravura filmmaking has elicited reactions ranging from raves positing him as his generation’s Kubrick to slams condemning his heightened style as a smokescreen to cover his lack of substance. Regardless of one’s opinion on the first decade of his career, The Wrestler sees Aronofsky produce an unqualified masterpiece – and completely refashion himself as a filmmaker in the process.
With Aronofsky’s visual flash stripped back to a more sparse approach, The Wrestler follows the path of over-the-hill professional wrestler Randy “The Ram” Robinson. The character is played by Mickey Rourke with unfathomable depth and power, as he wallows through a painful post-fame existence. Drawing from two decades of his own personal struggles, Rourke delivers a career-defining performance. Aronofsky’s handling of actors has never been better, as evidenced not only by Rourke, but by Marisa Tomei and Evan Rachel Wood, who also deliver work on par with anything in their careers, respectively starring as Robinson’s stripper girlfriend and estranged daughter.
In The Wrestler, Aronofsky has boiled his many talents down to their most potent, exhilarating essence. Free from the omnipresent artifice of his earlier work, he is finally able to create a film which bursts at every frame with the raw, crushing emotion which previously seemed to be lurking just below the surface, appearing in full only for fleeting moments of brilliance.
To call this a powerful film is to sell it laughably short: this is the sort of wrenchingly emotional, impossibly engaging work that reminds us why we all started going to the movies in the first place. And judging by its Golden Lion win at Venice, festival stealing showing at Toronto and closing night slot at New York, it seems Aronofosky has finally created a film that we can all agree on.
