New York Film Festival Dispatch: Wrestling for Two Crowds
Unlike many of the other significant film festivals on the calender, Lincoln Center’s annual New York City gathering offers very few surprises. Programmed by a handful of national critics (including The Village Voice’s J. Hoberman and Entertainment Weekly’s Lisa Schwartzbaum), this neatly curated assembly of several noteworthy accomplishments in contemporary world cinema borrows the highlights of several other recent festivals, particularly Cannes. The result is a global survey, now in its 46th year, that speaks to the interests of the general public and elite cinephiles alike.
The festival bookends alone speak to that unlikely audience blend: On Friday, the three-and-a-half week event kicked off with The Class, Laurent Cantet’s much-loved classroom drama, which won the prestigious Palme D’Or at Cannes in May. If that doesn’t immediately pique your interest, the festival’s closing night film has a better shot: Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler (above), a sharply directed story about the vain attempts of a washed-up pro-wrestler (Mickey Rourke, in a performance that’s, yes, sure to get an Oscar nomination) to stitch his life battered life back together. At times, it appears that he has pummeled his relationship with his estranged family even worse than his own broken body.
Touching, sad and never less than involving, The Wrestler is a classical narrative, and thus the most accessible movie of Aronofsky’s career (The Fountain was a trippy dud; Requiem for a Dream was too disturbing to gain anything more than a cult following). It’s also a firm reminder why the director first gained recognition as a talented filmmaker with his exhilarating quasi-sci-fi thriller Pi: He understands better than most modern storytellers that a tragic figure provides fertile ground for insight into the universal excesses plaguing all humanity. Rourke’s character, Randy “The Ram” Robinson, has fairly basic needs: To be loved, respected and understood. Failing to accomplish those goals in the real world, he retreats to the dangerous illusion of the ring.
The Wrestler is one of several movies at NYFF focused on a male character suffering from perilous self-image problems. The harrowing Italian mob drama Gomorrah takes an ensemble approach to showing the ability for organized crime to control an empire behind the veil of legality. Steven Soderbergh’s epic Che demonstrates the early appeal of Ernesto Guevara before the legend really set in. Personally, however, I’m obsessed with the delightfully subversive Tony Manero, an über-black comedy from Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight sidebar about a whackjob living under Chilean dictatorship in the early 1970’s with a dangerous fixation on John Travolta’s eponymous Saturday Night Fever persona. His self-serious approach to emulating the character’s moves makes you want to laugh and gag at once, particularly once it becomes clear that the guy’s a maniac. It’s like Napoleon Dynamite as a slasher film — in other words, further proof that NYFF offers the kind of diverse combination you’re unlikely to find anywhere else.
