It is pretty amazing to see a film earn such unanimous praise. The Wrestler currently enjoys a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Metacritic still hovers at a chilly 83 and it’s debatable that the Edelstein review is really that bad – he did offer it up as a Critics’ pick.
EW’s Owen Gleiberman gives the film a solid A and writes about Rourke:
That’s something Mickey Rourke must know a lot about. As a young star, he was a bow-lipped bad boy who wooed women on screen with his soft voice and twinkly, knowing smile. Now, it’s not just his look that has changed; he seems stunted ‚Äî all muscle and scar tissue, a figure of damaged loss. Miraculously, though, the softness remains. In The Wrestler, Rourke is at once an authentic former wrestling superstar, a Here’s How They Look Now! tabloid curiosity, and ‚Äî more than ever ‚Äî a great actor. With platinum hair down to his back, he’s like some bloated, freakazoid Sammy Hagar, and he makes you feel every crunched bone and pained breath, the way that Randy subjects his body to punishment to remind himself he’s alive. Aronofsky plays off Rourke’s fallen-icon status by feasting on that spectacular, pulped wreck of a face. Yet from within that mountain of wounded flesh, Rourke gives Randy a deep, slow voice of disarming gentleness. Randy is the soul of decency encased in a monster’s physique, with a buried sadness that, pushed far enough, explodes into rage.
And Edelstein on Rourke:
This is a case where an actor makes the difference. Mickey Rourke was once among our most charismatic leading men: alert, wittily self-contained (he always seemed to be smiling at a private joke), with a high but seductive voice. Whatever the hell he did to himself, it worked for Sin City, in which the makeup for his monster-man avenger Marv brought out the freakish poetry in his distended physiognomy. In The Wrestler, his face has that poetry without the makeup. Rourke has long blond hair that makes him look like a battered lion, and his tight, swollen mask makes Randy’s struggle to bare his soul even more momentous. It’s dumb, it’s outlandish, but smashing other people’s heads and getting his own smashed back really does complete him.
