Evidently, Obama's political self wrestled with his constitutional conscience, and won.
But only if we saw her working through her issues (and her narcissism) with more obvious intelligence and greater self-awareness, wrestling more thoughtfully with life the way that Ms. Holofcener herself has tried to do in this likable if frustrating film.
This story of Olympic gold medallists Mark and Dave Schultz, brothers whose bond was insidiously exploited by sociopathic billionaire and self-styled wrestling guru John du Pont, has a blunt, psychologically jarring ending that many of us already know; if it were fiction, you'd say it hardly made sense.
Similarly, The Invention of Love (1997) is deeply moving when the older AE Housman confronts his younger self or wrestles with his thwarted affection for his undergraduate pal Moses Jackson ("I would have died for you," says Housman, "but I never had the luck").
Conversations with near-strangers quickly dive into protected caverns of feeling, values, and dreams as we touch one another's emotional selves and wrestle unanswered questions such as the meaning of life.
(Memo to Johnson, if you really want to stop the "Rock" references to your former wrestling self, then don't put on 30 pounds of muscle and oil up so the sun reflects off the biceps — not complaining, just saying).
That may be Mr. Willis's biggest asset: his ability to find the contradictions in a working class man's sense of self and to wrestle with his own vulnerability.
To react to Keller was to be targeted anew, and Gordon writes movingly about taking on classic female roles – conciliation, self-effacement – but wrestling free of them through art and music.
Shane Zaza as the determined Abdul, Meera Syal as his free-swearing mother, Anjana Vasan as the self-improving Manju wrestling with the intricacies of Congreve and Virginia Woolf, Stephanie Street as the dubiously pragmatic Asha and Pal Aron as an inspirational teacher are all first-rate.
Reading them, it struck me that Tolstoy was now justifying himself as Vronsky, writing in a diary after his post-dinner tennis match, might have done twenty years earlier, if Vronsky had been a self-conscious sort wrestling with himself before sleep, which he wasn't.
