Foxcatcher

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.