Runtime: 2 hours, 14 minutes
Rating: R
Director: Bennett Miller
Quick Impressions:
I didn’t realize it until yesterday (I’m slow), but I remember when this happened. I didn’t know anything about wrestlers Mark and Dave Schultz, but John du Pont’s big standoff with the police was actually on the news for quite a while. I remember watching the story as it broke with my dad when I was in high school. For some reason, I thought du Pont had shot his girlfriend or female lover, but I must just have been confused about the details of the crime.
I don’t always like Bennett Miller’s movies. Well, I guess what I mean is, I found Capote far too dark and depressing to be enjoyable. (It had that great, “I went out the front door and he went out the back door” line, and of course Philip Seymour Hoffman is great, but what a demoralizing story!)
Foxcatcher is kind of a downer like that, too, but I thought it had a much more coherent narrative than internet chatter about the film and the crime had led me to believe.
I’ve been meaning to see this film for a while now, but I couldn’t decide, this or Selma first? I decided the prudent choice was to wait for Oscar nominations to be announced. Since director Bennett Miller, Steve Carell, and Mark Ruffalo are all nominated, this became the more pressing choice.
The movie definitely has great performances, arresting cinematography, and some thought provoking material. It’s not my favorite movie of the year by a long shot, but it’s definitely a very intriguing piece of work.
The Good:
The acting is great—such varied styles, all pretty captivating. The story feels very controlled (perhaps a bit too slow burning), but that’s probably why Bennett Miller got the directing nomination.
I also liked the score (ultimately. At first I thought there was no score. The beginning is so filled with long, painful silences!)
Channing Tatum is a revelation here. Hopefully he’ll be offered stronger scripts in the future based on this performance.
Most Oscar Worthy Moment, Steve Carell:
Honestly, I think Channing Tatum gives the best performance in this film, and definitely the best performance of his career. I disagree with people who insist that Carell should be nominated in Supporting, though. While it wouldn’t be a travesty to run him in Supporting, he is clearly in a leading role here. Yes for most of the film, Tatum’s Mark Schultz is the protagonist, but Carell’s character is just as central to the progression of the story. The key is that they are really the only two characters who get significant screen time, focus, and development. The only other “important” characters in Foxcatcher are Dave and old Mrs. du Pont, and compared to Tatum and Carell, Ruffalo and Redgrave get such a reduced share in the central action that anyone can see they are in supporting roles. (Contrast this with the situation in say, Twelve Years a Slave. Like du Pont, Edwin Epps is a crazy, compelling antagonist. The difference is, Epps is just one of many, many characters who interact significantly with the protagonist. Foxcatcher, on the other hand, might just as well be called A First Hand Account of the Destructive Madness of John du Pont as Told by Mark Schultz. Both Tatum and Carell are right at the heart of the story, and for most of the film, the rest of the cast is just set dressing.
Now as for Carell’s performance itself, I’m not sure that I see any significant difference between the worthiness of this performance and Jake Gyllenhaal’s in Night Crawler. (Meanwhile Ralph Fiennes is better, and I haven’t yet seen David Oyelowo.) I’m not knocking either turn, but both of them have kind of a self-conscious “look how carefully I’m crafting this kooky, dysfunctional character” quality.
Now I’m sure part of the appeal of Carell’s work here is seeing a consistently funny, often deliberately goofy comedian pull off a serious, dramatic role. (I’m not sure why this has come as a surprise to some people. Carell has always been a gifted actor who just happens to be great at making ordinary situations funny.)
Probably my favorite moment in the entire film is Mark and “Golden Eagle’s” cocaine-fueled speech practice in the helicopter. And Carell is particularly brilliant here because the ridiculous “philatelist, philanthropist, ornithologist” back-and-forth could so easily spiral into ridiculous comedy. In fact, the same actors could perform the same scene as comedy with just a subtle tweaking of their performances.
And yet the moment—so rife with ridiculousness—never does become out-and-out funny. Instead it becomes increasingly ludicrous and and eerily compelling.
I actually think this scene is an Oscar Worthy moment for both Tatum and Carell. Their bizarre screen chemistry here is riveting.
Another moment from Carell that really sticks with me is the fairly late scene when he begins “jogging” around the gym. The character is so pathetic and kind of tragically ridiculous, and yet Carell conveys this (physically) without injecting even a drop of comedy into the performance. It isn’t funny. It’s just sad.
Most Oscar Worthy Moment, Mark Ruffalo:
This is one of those performances that sneaks up on you, quietly building so that its cumulative effect is much more powerful than anything you would expect from its component parts.
Ruffalo is doing fine work. Some might call it the best acting in the film. What intrigues me is the observation (mine) that Tatum, Ruffalo, and Carell are all using slightly different styles of acting. Tatum’s performance seems almost Method in its intensity. Carell’s is very cerebral, somewhat stagey in some respects (though subtle). Ruffalo’s, meanwhile, is incredibly naturalistic. He slips into affable Dave Schultz and makes it just look easy. This difference in styles creates a very palpable tension among these three characters and also increases the likelihood that viewers are going to consider one of the performances vastly superior to the others (but disagree about which one it is).
Ruffalo definitely deserves his nomination. He’s tremendous in the documentary interview. What can one say, really, about John du Pont. Particularly because Dave has just revealed his motives for staying on to his brother in the scene before (another strong moment), his obvious discomfort here makes a lot of sense to us. Ruffalo plays this beautifully with such nuance and feeling in his silences that his words almost don’t matter.
Best Scene Visually:
I’m a big fan of the release of horses. Tatum’s bit with the mirror and slightly later on the bicycle are pretty resonant as well.
Best Scene:
We get a short scene (rather provocative in its evasiveness) of Mark and du Pont training together late at night. This is followed by an oddly intimate, soul-baring buddy chat out on the porch. Taken together, these scenes shed light on the intense relationship developing between the pair and set us up to understand the full significance of the highly dramatic moment that soon follows.
Best Action Sequence:
The slap is fantastic and brings the first portion of the film to a highly dramatic end.
Of course, what happens later between du Pont and Dave is pretty riveting, too.
The Negatives:
I see why Mark Schultz is angry about this movie. If his enraged tweets are genuine (and not part of some strange, staged PR campaign for the film), then I believe him when he says that director Bennett Miller deceived him.
The film definitely does imply a sexual relationship (or at least a sexualized dynamic) between Mark and du Pont. Schultz says that he didn’t like that one-on-one “training” scene, but Miller assured him that it was meant to show that du Pont did not respect his personal space, that he had no boundaries.
If I were Schultz, I would be so mad because I would think the movie implies that I basically pimped myself out to this rich, degenerate lunatic because I needed the money and was too dumb to realize his true intentions. And then of course I would think, Oh no! I’m so dumb I’ve let it happen again. I signed a contract, and these people deceived me and misrepresented my life, and didn’t respect me enough to think they had to deal with me honestly.
As evinced in the film and in his own tweets, Schultz clearly has some issues of his own, among them a clear impulse control problem.
But Bennett Miller certainly does make the relationship sexually charged and depict du Pont as extremely (perhaps even insidiously) gay. (Now maybe du Pont doesn’t realize or admit he’s gay, but the audience knows it and so does his mother.)
Mark Schultz definitely characterizes du Pont differently than the film does, and I tend to think that Schultz may be more in line with the actual facts on this one.
For one thing, Schultz actually lived these events. For another, Miller’s John du Pont is basically Norman Bates. I mean, it’s glaringly obvious in the movie. Every time his mother reprimands him for being “low” (by which she clearly means a disappointing, homosexual weirdo), he snaps and violently lashes out at the object of his unseemly passions in dramatic fashion. He’s also into stuffed birds. We get a whole scene of them looking at us from all over the room. I’m pretty sure if you carefully check each and every one of those cabins on the estate, you’ll find Janet Leigh dead in the shower in one of them.
I had heard this film didn’t present a coherent narrative explaining what happened with Dave, but it seems pointedly clear to me. In fact, it’s almost heavy handed. I think if you can’t connect the dots for yourself, maybe you need to watch more movies. (Maybe it’s just hard for some people to follow the motives of a crazy person.)
Now I’m not saying that John du Pont didn’t have some repressed homosexual tendencies and a creepy relationship with his disapproving mother. I’m just saying that the way this plays out on screen is a bit disappointingly movie standard. (We watch and think, Ah, that makes sense. Weird creepy seeming guys are always secretly gay. And sometimes they hurt people because they have overbearing mothers who are not nice to them. I know because that’s the way it always happens in the movies.) I feel like the complexity of the truth is being way oversimplified to fit a standard trope of the silver screen.
I think nearer the mark is that insanity gallops through the du Pont family. (They get arrested for weird, objectionable crimes all the time. Google it.) The movie seems to suggest that du Pont’s biggest problem is that he’s an unattractive, closeted misfit with a mean mommy. Okay, but Mark Schultz says he was constantly drunk and high on cocaine and had delusions of grandeur and lost his testicles in a childhood accident. I’m not saying those narratives aren’t compatible, but Schultz’s version hints at far greater complexity. Miller makes it seem like du Pont lost his testicles when his mother confiscated them because she didn’t want him to be gay. It just feels a little too stereotypical to be true. It’s kind of an insult to conflicted, closeted gay men who have nice enough mothers and refrain from violent crime.
I also wish Vanessa Redgrave were featured a bit more heavily. She’s a great actress, and I’d love to see a bit more complexity and nuance in that relationship. But I hear there is a much longer director’s cut out there, so we’ll see.
Overall:
Foxcatcher is not exactly the feel good movie of the year, but it is a well-directed (if a bit clichéd) piece of cinematic storytelling. I liked it less than Moneyball but more than Capote. The performances are all quite good, and I’m very pleased that Steve Carell has picked up his first Academy Award nomination.