Some good links first: the excellent
Bennett Miller episode of the Film Society of Lincoln Center's new yet already essential podcast The Close-Up. A longform
making-of piece in Vulture with lots of background on the protracted development process. And a good short interview from the
Atlantic.
Saw this today and admired it more than I thought I would. I think the trailer gives you a pretty accurate feel for the film, which is a rare thing nowadays. There's a feeling of tension and dread throughout. The most mundane interactions come freighted with fractured ominous silences and weird introverted rhythms. For a film that features so much actual wrestling, it's not surprising that the subtext of nearly every scene is some kind of relational grappling, a contest of power and position, dominance and submission. There's certainly more than a little homosociality on display here, but it would be reductive to read the film solely through this sort of theoretical lens.
Steve Carrell's performance is stunning, and he'll deserve every accolade and award coming his way. But the other actors are equally strong, perfectly cast and delivering career best work. Mark Ruffalo's everyman decency has never been put to better effect. And Channing Tatum's dark turn as his introverted brother will surprise anyone who thought he could only coast through much less demanding material on easy charm.
I can see why Bennett Miller became fascinated with this subject initially. But also what kind of immense uphill struggle it must have been to get the narrative into anything like a coherent shape and one that also still contained all of the elements that attracted him to it in the first place. To anyone who vaguely recalls the lurid true crime aspects of story, you'll realize afterward that they constitute about two percent of the screentime. What we're left with is, largely, a strange two-hander, a character study about two unselfaware and inarticulate men from two walks of life, both of whom see themselves as fatherless and friendless, both feeling as though their achievements up to now have been overlooked or overshadowed, both seeing in the other a chance to reverse that trend, both dangerously single-minded about just what it is they imagine will save them.
Miller smartly ignores many of the messy real-life details that would derail his drama or complicate it needlessly like
the fact that there's a fair amount of evidence that John du Pont wasn't just a drunk and a drug abuser, megalomaniacally rich-guy paranoid in the somewhat standard if outsized Howard Hughes fashion, but that he was also likely seriously mentally ill, even psychotic.
Instead, Miller's and Carrell's du Pont is study in Hughesian isolation. John du Pont is like Howard Hughes without any of the actual creativity or derring-do. He's playing at life vicariously through his checkbook, buying off other people to live it for him, but when it comes down to it, he's got nothing more to show for his own efforts than a couple of obscure ornithology books. Though he talks a lot, he's the sort of rich guy who doesn't really feel the need to speak up for himself, doesn't even bother with a withering glance that says "Do you know who I am?" Instead, he'll have his bodyguard hand you a videotape about "the du Pont dynasty." If John du Pont didn't have his money, he'd be nothing at all, and he seems to know this at some very deep level, which is why the scenes where he flexes the power of his nearly limitless wealth and privilege are so conflicted.
Tatum's Mark, though he's from a completely different socioeconomic background, seems equally unable to assert himself or explain what it is he really wants and needs out of his life and his athletic career. He's an Olympic gold medalist when we first meet him, but that won't even cover his gas money. He's eating bad fast food and living in a lonely bachelor pad. He feels overshadowed by the achievements of his older brother, but also knows that he can't really blame his brother either for any of this, as David (as played by Ruffalo) is pretty much the nicest most loving and responsible athlete, coach, father and brother anyone could wish for, never holding a grudge or giving up on Mark, always saying and doing just the right thing.
At one point, late in the film, John E. (that's "E" for "Eagle" he asserts, adding "my friends call me 'Eagle' or 'Golden Eagle' or 'John'") du Pont tells his mother that he doesn't care about an old train set she's thinking about donating to charity. And the irony, of course, is that neither one of them can quite own up to the fact that the train set he does care about, the one he sometimes plays with nonstop and demands be in working order and ready for his attentions at all hours but then also abandons petulantly for weeks at a time -- that train set is his wrestling team. And it isn't enough for him to be their patron, he also needs to be seen as their coach (though he has no useful skills or advice and the best generic rah-rah speeches he can muster are singularly uninspiring) and finally as one of them. Later in the film, without any awareness of the profound irony, du Pont tells Mark about the pain he felt upon realizing his mother had been paying his only childhood friend to hang out with him.
There's an element of gothic horror -- think
Sunset Boulevard's kept-man nightmare and the decadent old money architecture in that film and others -- that almost flirts with camp in one scene (shirtless hunk, drug and alcohol bender, odd personal grooming tableau) that could be a alternate casting screentest for Soderbergh's
Behind the Candelabra. At times there's also an undercurrent of pitch black deadpan comedy, especially in some of the dialogue. But mostly
Foxcatcher, mirroring the repressed males that are its subject, feels suffocatingly if not pathologically controlled, intensely restrained in the most compelling way. It's easy to see how Miller deserved his best director nod at Cannes.
The film, shot by Greg Fraiser, looks great, but the look of it isn't the main thing --
Foxcatcher aspires to a sort of polished mainstream realism that can be a little more expressive when it needs to but doesn't call too much attention to itself and reminds me of the best of Jonathan Demme's mid career work, films like
The Silence of the Lambs. Everything here seems to have been shot and cut within an inch of its life -- in the best possible sense -- and almost always in the service of the performances, of wringing one more layer or nuance out of any given line reading. The editing is also elliptical and coy about timeframes major and minor, all of it adding to the closed off feeling of the whole. There are a lot of bold sound choices, moments where the sound or dialogue cuts out altogether or the normal sound of a room gets muddled (for those who hate the
Interstellar mix, here's how to do it right). There's not a lot of smoothing over things with ambiance. And the music, especially a piece by Atom Egoyan's go-to guy Mychael Danna, is evocative and dare I say Egoyanesque, fitting for such a weird relationship drama.
