The Touching Story of a Young Man not Doing Anything

Rating: 5/10 (8 March 2015)

I walked into the theater wanting and expecting to like Foxcatcher. At first, the slow and stripped-down approach to each moment was interesting, but then I found out that the entire movie would be that. Lingering on the nothingness between events. About a quarter of the way through, I found myself more engaged by the fact that I had weird smelling burps from dinner. I don't know about you, but in my opinion, the journey of a depressed wrestler, a sociopath billionaire, drugs, depression, and obsession should be more interesting that a minor case of mouth farts.
Channing Tatum can act. He's been in enough B-movies and needed an acting role he deserved. So, he got cast in this movie. Channing didn't let me down in this department. He, Mark Ruffalo, and Steve Carell gave outstanding acting performances. I was impressed all the way through with how believable Channing Tatum was as an confused, emotional wreck. Mark Ruffalo made me feel for him just for being a nice guy. Steve Carell seriously delivered in his non-comedic role by being a skeevy bastard all the way through, even in harmless conversation. I was stunned by their performances, but that wasn't enough fuel to keep the movie engine going.
I'm not one of those guys who go into movies expecting everything to be going at light speed all the way through, though I prefer it. I understand that a movie might take time to show us things, but there's always a reason. The long sequence of the Dave re-entering the ship in Space Odyssey was to create tension. But Foxcatcher meanders and panders to people who think waiting through a slow movie is some kind of accomplishment. You didn't win a prize. You sat on your proud, waxed ass through a movie that didn't edify anyone.
The moments where I really was pulled in by what was happening were like needles in a stack of sentient hay that tries to smother the poor needles with its dragging artiness. These few great moments were just brief interruptions of the shots of du Pont's team running, training, sitting, and generally doing what they're meant to do: work. I once listened to a consultant at a paint store explain why she thought the colors in people's houses are important. It was interesting because it was her passion and she explained it with passion. Foxcatcher goes into excruciating detail about wrestling technique, but for all that it does, I still didn't care. This 134 minute jaunt across the pacific beaches of Planet Dull was uneventful and lead up to five minutes of climax. And what a climax it was. A great one. One that happened without warning or logic. It may be a true story, but that's no excuse. It's actually LESS of an excuse. John du Pont was a real guy. Surely someone looked into his motivations at some point. Out of those 134 minutes, I'm going to liberally guess that I enjoyed 20. That's 26.8% good. That's 73.2% drab void-space. That's too damn much boring. That's a failure of storytelling.
The movie's tortuously slow progression to a dissatisfying ending expects the audience to enthusiastically bury their faces into its cleavage. The beautiful acting and decent production couldn't pull from the bowels of the cinema sewers its one, true, feces encrusted love: Foxcatcher, or (How I Learned to Stop Worrying and This Movie Bombed)