By Michael S. Goldberger, film critic
You couldn’t tell my Dad wrestling was fake. In his favorite chair, our little dog Tibble on his lap, he’d root with a fervor that we feared would kill him. Here was a man who lost almost everything in the Holocaust, started all over in America, and made a safe world for two children. But wrestling was real. Like “The Wrestler,” he got the metaphor.
Darren Aronofsky’s no-holds-barred character study starring Mickey Rourke as Randy “The Ram” Robinson, a onetime headliner now resigned to the faded glory of matches in Elks Clubs and high school gyms, has a Cassavetes-like starkness. It is truth artistically conveyed but without artifice. If it holds that grace is possible, it isn’t easily achieved.
