'The Iron Claw' Doesn’t Quite Take Hold

Given a long enough timeline, everybody of note winds up redeemed. So it goes with Texas’ star-crossed Von Erich family of wrestlers, which serves as the “inspiration” for director Sean Durkin’s The Iron Claw, a gorgeously-shot film that aims for epic sweep across its 140-minute runtime. Durkin nails the sweep part — decades of history and one whole brother, the most unfortunate of the five who crossed the rainbow bridges, are swept under the rug. The result is hard to figure: unlike Darren Aronofsky’s gritty but fantastical The Wrestler, which turned Mickey Rourke’s beaten-down Randy the Ram into a figure of mythic scope, The Iron Claw instead serves up a drama that is neither real nor fake, true nor false, fish nor fowl. If pressed to provide a blurb, I suppose I would say, “It’s interesting,” but interesting to whom?