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Mickey Rourke's heralded performance is one of native resilience - in 'real life' Rourke was a gifted actor who quite inexplicably turned to a late career in boxing, only to have his once handsome face transform into a "broken down piece of meat," so that now he has triumphantly returned to acting after surviving years of being the burnt end of bad wash-up jokes. Rourke was an athlete who went the round of underground boxing competitions, and his father was a bodybuilder of some prestige - so it came as a fortunate consequence that Aronofsky selected him, despite the producers' skepticism about Rourke's abilities, to lead in a film essentially about a washed-up star whose only constant is the pain he feels at having been passed on by time and faded memories. When Rourke does anything onscreen, whether he mumbles romantically to a heart-of-gold stripper in a noisy hiphop nightclub or endures the humiliation of the elderly in a hospital or at a fan signing, or suffers the sharp regret of a cold jog in his brutalized chest, we feel his pain: when he breathes, it hurts you to watch him breathe; when he looks at his daughter with the small dim eyes of an aged and battered bear, we sense that his pain is quite unlike any we have known - that his pain is worse for the strength it takes him to bear it up.
Despite the fact that Aronofsky was rather gifted with Rourke's charismatic 'method' performance (the director confessed that much of the time he merely allowed Rourke the time and space to soak up his energies and perform as he listed; whereas when it came to the predictable impulses by Evan Rachel Wood to act extremely offended at her father's lack of responsibility, the director seemed to allow her an unnecessary indulgence - though this was probably more a result of an underwritten character than either Wood's inability to subtilize herself or Aronofsky's lack of guidance); The Wrestler comes across nonetheless as a surprising victory in technical restraint and authentic sincerity in dramatic art. After the fatuous technical gratuities of The Fountain, which sapped that film of all its presumed metaphysical seriousness, The Wrestler comes across as not only a 'straight-forward' film for a technically overtalented director, but also an enterprise of skilled editorial work - that is, a work of mature compulsion. The story is simple enough and the characters obvious enough, but the film manages to zoom along its forceful path of realism without the least affectation or overemphasis on dialogue. The film is a return to form, but hardly an innovation in Aronofsky's brand of stripped storytelling: the dramatic simplicity and reductive force of Pi and the penetrating and nearly obsessive focus on the gradual breakdown of the body in Requiem for a Dream are both compacted in the muscular vehicle of The Wrestler. (In contrast, The Fountain was an overly ambitious attempt at cinematic grandiosity and narrative innovation that proved to be a colossal failure for a director of so minimal an aesthetic as Aronofsky: his brilliance lies in a minimum of effects made puissant by their repetitive use, his manner of thought dependent on strictly visceral kinematics rather than on the de rigeur subtlety that a more precise metaphysics would require.) Aronofsky is hardly a director who takes risks - he has chosen here a wellworn vehicle whose model insists on a conventional story arc - but he has proven to the establishment that where convention predominates, a liberty of cinematic interpretation can take place. Aronofsky's stellar use of the digital medium, his seamless capture of wrestling mechanics, and his vigilance over the character's persona & environment (following Rourke from behind his back in a tracking shot motif, as if in pursuit of a docile but no less fearsome bull as it scatters or converges with those that lie in its path) are indicative of a director who grows less reliant on pyrotechnics & exaggerated 'realism', and more comprehending of the terrible pathos in a life turned minor and diminished but whose pain becomes resultingly more direct and fatal.
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Cf. Scorcese's Raging Bull - it has interested me to see The Wrestler's stripped down mechanics in light of Scorcese's risk-taking and lyrical asides - there are many scenes in Raging Bull that would not have worked in The Wrestler, not because they are different stories (on the surface, but they are essentially the same model), but because Scorcese is exactly the kind of director who is so defined by his ideals and erudition that he can turn equally lyrical and brutal in a single transition - whereas Aronofsky (who I'm unfairly comparing to a pastmaster) is exactly that kind of director who calculates his effects in a measurable force, allowing little space for risk-taking lyricism since his plastic imagination is confined to the solitary strengths of the camera's novelty (and not to the literary quality that cinema is also capable of, and which makes Scorcese a more complete director.)
According to Aronofsky, the difference between a Raging Bull and his Wrestler results from a disproportion in time and money and from a contemporaneous demand for efficiency, marketability, and budgeting:
"There was no money to do [The Wrestler] any other way. We just had to move, move, move. It was the only way to do it. I look at these films like—well, I’m not worthy to be compared to Raging Bull, though comparisons have been made—but, if you look at that film, it’s just an incredible movie. I don’t know if there’s a way to make films like that anymore. Every now and then something like There Will Be Blood gets made, a director’s given enough time and resources to get through it, but it’s really hard when you only have 35 days to make anything as classic as Raging Bull. The Wrestler became about seizing the grunge and our limitations and turning them into our strength. It would be great to have the time and the resources to make a movie the way they used to. Things have gotten so expensive. Something like Raging Bull in today’s world would be $60-70,000,000 and to sell it would be another $30,000,000. Raging Bull would be a $100,000,000 movie in today’s world."
(http://twitchfilm.net/site/view/the-wrestlerinterview-with-darren-aronofsky/)
One has to contend that from the amount of time and money invested in The Fountain, Aronofsky would have achieved something similar in value to Raging Bull or even There Will Be Blood; but where time and resources are seen to be the determining factor in accomplishing a vision, then that vision is already compromised and eventuates to no more than a two-hour long music video, which that worst of Aronofsky's films sums up to be; The Wrestler, on the other hand, is a film whose vision coincides with its methodology - its thematic is one of reduction and absorption, hence its minimal budget allows for its vision to take place in the fact of its brevity. A work of art derives from an absolute minimum of resources, in spite of their lack - it is a work of art precisely because it surpasses its means.
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