Great Performances, Disappointing Film

Rating: Null/10 (27 January 2015)

Foxcatcher (2014)
** 1/2 (out of 4)
Olympic gold-medal winner Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum) receives a phone call ordered by billionaire John du Pont (Steve Carell) who wants the wrestler to come to his home and form a wrestling team to compete in the 1988 Olympics. Soon Mark's brother David (Mark Ruffalo) is brought on as a coach but soon both brothers start to see that something isn't quite right with du Pont.
FOXCATCHER is without a question a very somber little picture and one that's incredibly depressing and rather hard to watch at times. It seems a lot of people are either finding it to be a masterpiece or praising the performances but finding the film itself flawed, which is the group I'm going to fall in. For the life of me I can't remember the last time I walked out of a movie wanting to like it a lot more than I actually did. A good half hour after the movie had ended I was still debating with myself the qualities of the picture but after much thought I just felt there were way too many flaws for me to fully praise the picture.
The one thing that can be praised are the performances with Tatum actually stealing the show. I was really shocked to see how great he was here but he's got quite a bit of emotions to play and I thought he did them perfectly. Early on the character just strikes you as a rather dumb jock but slowly we start to see the emotional problems that this guy is suffering with. Tatum has no problems at pulling off these emotions and there's no doubt that his physical shape made him very believable as a wrestler. Ruffalo has always been an underrated actor and he too really gets to shine here, although his character doesn't come into more focus until near the end. As for Carell, he appears to be getting the majority of the credit and there's no doubt that he's excellent but the psychological nature of the performance doesn't really get to shine until the final twenty-minutes when the actor really nails the role. Just the look in his eyes and the way he carries himself is quite chilling.
As I said, I thought there were quite a few flaws with the film and of course what I didn't like about the picture is the same thing that most love. I really didn't care for the style that Bennett Miller brought to the picture. Again, this is one of the most somber movies I've ever seen and I don't mind the pale, cold and distant feel of the picture but at the same time the first eighty-minutes just seemed to add up to nothing much. The biggest problem I had is that it was all style and very little character development and even by the end of the movie I thought there were more unanswered questions about these characters. For the life of me I thought the development should have been a lot better. I thought the actors, especially Carell, could have been better used earlier in the picture but the actor doesn't get to shine until the end.
Another problem I had with the picture is that it just moves along way too slow for its own good. Again, I understand what Miller was going for but I just didn't think it worked as well as it needed to be and I thought a lot of emotional was missing from the picture up until the ending, which I won't spoil. I think one could argue that the slowness at the start of the picture was meant to lead up to the shocking conclusion but to me the start just didn't work. Technically speaking the film features some great cinematography and editing but this here just can't overcome the flaws I had with the story and direction. FOXCATCHER features some great performances, which makes the film worth viewing but it's still a disappointment.