Interview. Darren Aronofsky and Marisa Tomei.

"The Wrestler may be plenty visceral, but it's no more a sports movie than professional wrestling is a competitive sport," writes J Hoberman. "Chronic over-reacher Darren Aronofsky's relatively unpretentious follow-up to the ridiculous debacle that was The Fountain is all about showbiz. It's also a canny example. You want to make a comeback saga, you get a washed-up star—in this case, Mickey Rourke, for whom, as Scott Foundas reported in a Voice cover story, Aronofsky and screenwriter Robert Siegel conceived the movie."

Jeffrey M Anderson talks with Aronofsky and Marisa Tomei.

Updated through 12/22.

"The news that Ms Tomei plays a stripper may make you roll your eyes - it may, for that matter, make them pop out of your head - but her job is more than an excuse to get exposed flesh other than Mr Rourke's up on the screen," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "Randy and Cassidy (it's not her real name, either) are both performers, both expert at faking something the customers desperately want to believe is real. The wrestlers don't really hate one another, and the stripper doesn't really love you."

"There must be a cerebral component to the way Rourke approached becoming the aging wrestler at the center of this film, because otherwise I doubt he'd have been able to so deftly navigate the character's expansive emotional arc while still nailing all the jokes," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "But this performance goes way beyond the brain, or the precision with which Rourke transformed his appearance, or even the naturalism with which he performs the wrestling choreography. This is a performance that seems to start and end in the cardiovascular system, making everything Rourke actually does seem effortless. As if he's just breathing it."

Aronofsky "crafted cruelly effective moments - images that stick hard and wane only over the long run - in both Pi and Requiem for a Dream, but my overall sense of his films thus far has been of film-school hypermasculinity run amok," writes Jeff Reichert for indieWIRE. "It may sound paradoxical to suggest that Aronofsky's not a terrible filmmaker even though he's made a series of unnecessarily brutal, intellectually lacking movies, but this is about exactly where he leaves off: visually gifted, intensely visceral, and with about the most lame-brained narrative and aesthetic instincts this side of Guy Ritchie. One need only spend a few minutes with The Fountain to see the effects of cinematic ego gone wild; one need spend even less with the weary, credibly inhabited The Wrestler to see what happens when unbridled creativity gets productively boxed in by a few well-considered limitations."

"Allusions to Christ are everywhere," notes David Edelstein in New York; "the stripper talks about the carnage in The Passion of the Christ. Is Aronofsky being tongue in cheek? I don't think he's ever tongue in cheek."

Andrew Schenker: "The Wrestler's at its best when it focuses on the physical - the surprisingly graceless in-the-ring pounding, the post-bout doctor exam, Rourke's heavy breathing whenever he walks - or when it positions its central figure as a fish-out-of-water in a particularly dismal suburbia - dishing out potato salad behind the counter of a supermarket deli, his strings of blond hair absurdly done up in a sanitary net."

"Here, finally, is a film that, through its very intimacy, touches on love, money, dreams and death in a way that will pile-drive you through the mat," writes Joshua Rothkopf in Time Out New York.

"Aronofsky once again insists on degrading his characters, but this time, to our relief, he also shows them compassion," writes Benjamin Strong in the L Magazine.

In the Guardian, Robert Tait reports on how The Wrestler has become the "new target in Iran's long-running grievance about its negative portrayal in popular western cinema."

Earlier: Reviews from Venice and Toronto and New York.

Updates: "There's an extra thrill that comes from loving a movie you thought you were going to hate," writes Dana Stevens in Slate. "The idea that Rourke, an 80s sex symbol coming off 20 years of Bukowski-esque dissolution, had this in him makes a crazy sort of sense. That Aronofsky had it in him is a rebuke to the complacency of viewers who, like me, thought they had his number."

"It hasn't been easy for Mickey Rourke fans over the last 15 years." So begins a longish, career-encompassing reflection from Sheila O'Malley at the House Next Door. Somewhere in the middle, having recounted the rockiest years: "What a spectacular and self-inflicted fall from grace." Then: "It is not my place to ponder why Mickey Rourke did what he did to his beautiful face. I have some theories. We've all got theories. They are, ultimately, irrelevant. What struck me, in watching his performance in The Wrestler, is how he consciously references us back to those old performances."

"Rourke's work in the film transcends mere stunt-casting," writes Alonso Duralde at MSNBC; "his performance is a howl of pain that seems to come from a very real place, and it's a potent reminder - as was his compelling role in Sin City a few years ago — that even if Rourke has made a mess of his career, his talent remains intact."

"Rourke never lost the power to excite every pore of someone's consciousness with the way he speaks and holds the intensity of the entire story in his hands when he does command our attention," writes Evan Louison in the Cinema Echo Chamber. "He just lost interest. We bored him as audiences and so he proceeded to bore us back. He is still boring us. Only now he is boring a small hole straight into the backs of our skulls so our feelings seep out and we ask ourselves the question that this film begs we ask, that is really the only connection with his other work: 'If all this can be survived, what is there that cannot be survived?'"

At the AV Club, Noel Murray finds it "hard to imagine a better director for a story of wrestling and its discontents than Darren Aronofsky, who emphasizes the barrenness and chill of the story's wintry suburb-scapes. Early in The Wrestler, Aronofsky goes overboard with the Dardennes-style follow-shots, holding on the back of Rourke's head more for affectation's sake than to enhance the mood. But Aronofsky also helpfully lingers over the lurid details of combat theater - the razors, the barbed wire, the staple guns, the faint whine of feedback from an old hearing aid - and gives what might've been just another thinly plotted, often obvious indie melodrama a thick shot of viscera."

"The Wrestler is at its best when it's between the ropes" but "starts to get clumsy when it leaves the arena," writes Adam Nayman in Reverse Shot, where he recalls "a moment that silenced the sold-out audience on the final morning of the Toronto International Film Festival: a literal leap of faith that gives a fetching tingle of understatement while simultaneously hammering home the point like a double-axe handle to the back of the head - which is also a pretty good description of The Wrestler, come to think of it."

"The Wrestler doesn't add up," finds Kenneth Turan. "It's constructed with great care around a lead performance that is everything it could possibly be, but the picture itself is off-putting and disappointing." Also in the Los Angeles Times, Mark Olsen profiles Aronofsky and talks with Rourke.

Kristin McCracken talks with Rourke for Tribeca.

Bilge Ebiri talks with Aronofsky for Vulture.

Updates, 12/18: "Darren Aronofsky has made a literal-minded parable about suffering and mankind's miserable existence," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "Aronofsky inflicts as much pain on the audience as self-flagellating Ram Jam does when brutalizing/mutilating himself in and outside the ring."

Keith Phipps talks with Aronofsky for the AV Club.

Updates, 12/20: Aronofsky's "previous films - Pi, Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain - have been stylistically goosed up, with lots of flashy gimmicks and attempts at thematic profundity," writes Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat. "In The Wrestler, he plays it straight, giving us a clear, linear narrative, interrupted only by one intercut flashback. The step away from pyrotechnics becomes him."

Michael Guillén interviews Tomei.

Screengrab lists "Cinema's Greatest Comebacks."

Online listening tip. Aronofsky is a guest on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Online viewing tip. Mark Kermode looks back on Rourke's career.

Update, 12/22: "Darren Aronofsky's talent is obvious, but until now his gifts haven't included the ability to make a consistently satisfying film," writes Steve Erickson in Gay City News. "That said, The Fountain, his third film, struck me as a step forward. While ridiculous in many respects - a friend said that it looks like a Yes album cover come to life - it nevertheless tells a heartfelt love story in sci-fi guise. Its New Age overtones are often silly, yet they're preferable to Aronofsky's attempts to give the audience a collective panic attack in Requiem for a Dream. The Wrestler is another step forward for Aronofsky, one that continues to bring some emotional substance to his work."

Posted by dwhudson at December 17, 2008 12:44 AM