As fake as wrestling

"The Wrestler" doesn't add up. 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. How can this be?
That performance, as all of Hollywood already knows, is Mickey Rourke's affecting work as Randy "the Ram" Robinson, a once great name in professional wrestling who has fallen on hard times, reduced to bouts in school gymnasiums to pay the rent on his bleak trailer. As the blues lyric says, if he didn't have bad luck, he wouldn't have no luck at all.
Rourke, who's had his own very public bouts with career disintegration, falls naturally into this role and makes it his own. The actor has said he hesitated to take it on "because it was a little too close," and that innate understanding of what his character is going through, combined with Rourke's ability, make this one of the performances of the year.
Rourke brings just the right amount of faded charisma to Robinson, a man whose face is so frozen he can only express emotion with his eyes. With his long, curly golden hair, his artificial tan, steroid-enhanced musculature and bloated face, the actor is not playing himself but rather a part powerfully informed by his past life.

Initially, at least, the rest of "The Wrestler" feels like a good fit with Rourke's work. As written by Robert Siegel, shot in verite style by Maryse Alberti and directed by Darren Aronofsky, the film has captured the down-at-the-heels ambience of the lower rungs of professional wrestling, a subculture that was into performance art well before the high culture world heard of it.

Things start to fall apart when "The Wrestler's" determination to wallow in the pain of Robinson's bouts reveals itself. A certain amount of that is necessary, but this film pushes well beyond that, yearning for the excessive until it feels like Aronofsky and company are making a fetish of audience discomfort. When a wrestler is introduced whose trademark is using a staple gun on opponents, it becomes clear that these scenes are not about realism, they are about making us squirm for squirming's sake.

The aftermath of that staple-gun bout leads Robinson to the knowledge that he may not be able to wrestle again. He starts to reassess his life and tries to establish emotional connection with the two people he is closest to. That turns out not to be such a good idea, either for the Ram or the film.