This is Bennett Miller’s third strike in my book. Moneyball
was frustrating and I remember Capote
being pretty whatever. Foxcatcher, while his best effort, is
not very good either.
The story involves super rich John du Pont recruiting Olympic
gold medalist brothers Mark and Dave Schultz to head up a wrestling
program. John knows nothing about the
sport but pretends to and even bears the title Head Coach. As these things go there’s eventually rifts,
drugs, erratic behavior by du Pont and so on.
It sounds like this should be interesting but Miller turns
it into such a slog. One of the biggest
problems is that the focus isn’t so much on du Pont but the Schultz brothers. This doesn’t make sense to me. Mark Schultz goes through a bunch with him
living in the shadow of his older brother, looking up to du Pont like a father
figure at first and becoming a MMA fighter for UFC. That’s all good stuff. But this should be about the drug addicted,
totally self-absorbed, awkwardly social lunatic with serious mother issues,
John du Pont. Even though du Pont is in
most of the film it feels like we’re teased with him and don’t get the man full
on. He’s used more simply as a tool to
move the story along. We don’t explore nearly
enough of his psyche.
Steve Carell’s (Hope
Springs, Dan in Real Life) performance epitomizes the movie itself. He plays it dry and monotone. When there’s some emotion Carell never raises
his voice or changes the look of the top half of his face. His mouth does all of the moving. He comes off too much like a robot. I went to go look at some footage of the real
John du Pont and there was more to him than how Steve plays it. Granted, the footage I saw is of du Pont
desperately attempting to portray a certain image and establish an identity but
in the movie Carell doesn’t act any differently in front of a camera crew where
he should pretending to be charismatic. I
think there’s potential here though and Carell seems capable of pulling off a
serious dramatic role. The thing is he
needs a better director to help guide him through.
Channing Tatum (She’s
the Man, The Eagle) delivers the best performance as Mark. Whether he’s hurting or happy he’s intense and
you feel for him. He just wants to
establish his own thing and gets the opportunity with du Pont. Unfortunately his life turns into a bit of a
mess and Tatum goes through all of the emotions great. I liked him from 21 Jump Street but this one shows he can act with the big boys if
he wants to.
Mark Ruffalo (Zodiac, 13
Going on 30) plays it straight. He
does fine but they don’t show us anything that makes this character stand out. He’s a family man, he loves his brother and
he’s supposed to be a helluva wrestler but there’s only one very brief part
that shows this off.
Bringing it back to Bennett Miller, I kind of can’t stand
his filmmaking style. Visually he doesn’t
put a lot of interesting stuff in the frame most of the time and filters the
entire thing with a grayish tone. Not
only is it sorta depressing but he also likes to use a fair amount of static
shots, which I’ve actually been championing more use of, but in this case it
just makes the scenes more tedious to get through. He likes to have the characters sitting there
silently for long stretches too which doesn’t help.
This movie is really serious and kinda boring. I wasn’t totally engaged and found my mind
wandering which is weird because I was able to predict several key events that ultimately
unfolded later (I knew nothing about John du Pont, the Schultz’s or Team Foxcatcher
before watching this). Thinking back on the
picture for this Talkin’ I’m having a hard time remembering how things unfolded
and why because the whole thing turns into a blob in my mind. I mean look at the plot description I wrote,
it’s pitifully vague.
Miller does seem to be improving because I liked this the
best of his three majors but at the same time I have a good number of issues with
this film. Stick a fork in Benny, I’m
done with him.
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