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One of the festival’s biggest buzz movies was Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, which ended a distribution drought on Monday when Fox Searchlight picked up the U.S. rights for $4 million. Its main attraction is Mickey Rourke’s unimpeachable performance as a washed-up wrestling star who’s still riding on the fumes of his 80s glory when a coronary forces him into retirement for good. Rourke is one of those actors who’s always working (since Diner made him a star in 1982, he’s appeared in a whopping 50 features) but who’s become such an industry punchline that any good role is inevitably heralded as a comeback. In The Wrestler he looks like a truck ran over him, but I can’t think of many 52-year-old actors still ripped enough to get away with this role; the real subtext of The Wrestler is Rourke’s indomitability, not the character’s. The story is fairly sentimental—more Requiem for a Heavyweight than Requiem for a Dream—and the wrestler’s relationships with his estranged daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) and a stripper with a heart of gold (Marisa Tomei, another jaw-dropping specimen at 43) are pretty familiar. But the grimy details of life at the bummed-out bottom of the wrestling circuit are so convincing that I was pulled into the story anyway.
Another French production screening at Toronto—and scheduled for the Chicago film festival in October—was I’ve Loved You So Long, the debut feature of novelist Philippe Claudel. As the film opens, a middle-aged woman (Kristin Scott Thomas) is waiting for her much younger sister (Elsa Zylberstein) to pick her up at the airport; the woman has just been paroled from prison after 15 years, and before long Claudel reveals that she was convicted of killing her six-year-old son. Claudel withholds the details of the crime until the very end—you’d think a novelist would know better than to play around like that—exploring instead whether the killer, who moves in with her sister’s family for the time being, can ever be accepted again by them or the larger community. Thomas acquits herself admirably as the remote, hardened woman, but when the truth finally comes out, it’s considerably less heinous than one might have imagined. I’ve Loved You So Long purports to be about living with guilt, but in the end Claudel seems more intent on ameliorating it.
