The Wrestler

Darren Aronofsky has my full attention. Few directors start their careers making films that are as singularly different from one another as they are good. Aronofsky follows up the soul experience that was The Fountain with a piece of kitchen sink realism about an aging wrestler's swan song. The Wrestler pulls emotional ham strings you didn't even know you had.
Mickey Rourke plays Randy The Ram Robinson with close to the edge of the precipice histrionics. This isn't your grandfather's or your daddy's requiem for a heavyweight movie. Those were boxing films. The Wrestler culls another type of fisticuffs. The kind of staged antics and genuine masochism on display (in two scenes in particular) are unlike anything one would normally expect. It's this tone of the film that will limit wide appeal because of its ability to psyche out its audience.
There's plenty of subtext if you want to examine what you watch in The Wrestler but the surface stillness without pretension is what makes the film powerful viewing. Rouke's Ram goes from humiliation to letdown to heart attack without loosing his cool. He's been locked out of his trailer and instead of being able to use his reputation to earn money in the ring he must take a job at the deli counter. Okay, he loses his cool in a couple of scenes. In Aronofsky's movie the deli counter represents the psychological equivalent of Sisyphus rolling a stone up a hill. The Ram may have won a title fight in the past but his current rank and glory means having had a vintage action figure made in his image.
The Wrestler allows us to see The Ram being directly responsible for his own fuck-ups, mistakes that lead to irrevocable loses and pain. Aronofsky draws us into The Ram's circle, not of friends, but acquaintances like an estranged daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) or potential romance (Marissa Tomei). The actors and situations give The Wrestler a kind of current that amps you up. The Wrestler rates high on my fight card because it takes a grim view of the human condition yet in a forgiving way.