the wrestler

Films like Hotel Rwanda and Schindler's List are difficult to watch. They are cinematic portraits of real-world human suffering, often with unsettling imagery. And then there's director Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler.

I am the type who leans toward more glamorous, stylish cinema. As such, The Wrestler, a film filled with excessively gruesome scenes of professional wrestling, was an especially difficult film to watch. So it serves as a testament to the quality of the film that the scars and blood are not distractions.

Mickey Rourke, as Randy "The Ram" Robinson, is the core of the film. A character whose tombstone would surely read "sic transit gloria," Rourke offers a layered performance of a man at once self-pitying, tortured and embittered yet charming, wholesome and chivalrous. Living in the shadow of his 1980s glory, Ram rekindles his tattered relationship with daughter Stephanie (Evan Rachel Wood) and falls for a single mother/stripper expertly played by Marisa Tomei. He vacillates between hopeful progress and enraged, indulgent regression. It is a gritty portrait of a broken man.

And though much of the discussion of the film has made it seem as if the film's merit begins and ends with Rourke's performance (and, to a lesser degree, Tomei's), Aronofsky's direction is cause for celebration. The script suffers from some heavy-handedness, but Aronofsky turns it into an affecting tragedy. Although the film is a far cry from his previous work, it is both challenging and aesthetically gruesome in the ways we have come to expect from him. But The Wrestler is emotionally honest and brutal as Aronofsky has never been before-and as few films could ever hope to be.