Oscar buzz for Carell in Foxcatcher | Daily Mail Online Oscar buzz for Carell in Foxcatcher e-mail Funnyman Steve Carell is best known for his comedy chops, but it's his disturbing turn in Foxcatcher that's generating rave reviews and Oscar buzz from Cannes. An almost unrecognisable Carell sports a prosthetic nose, receding hairline and ageing make-up to play the mentally ill millionaire John E du Pont. A wrestling fanatic who bankrolled the US squad in the mid 1990s, du Pont was sentenced to prison after his friendship with Olympic-gold winning wrestling brothers, Mark (played by Channing Tatum) and Dave Schultz (Mark Ruffalo) ended in tragedy. Variety film critic Justin Chang called it a "powerfully disturbing true-crime saga" and praised the three leading men, but Carell in particular. Indiewire's Jessica Kiang said the character of du Pont was "one of the most complex" and "fascinatingly" messed up ever seen on screen. "Vocally, physically and psychologically (Carell) is not just unrecognisable, he simply is a different man, and a man whose tragic flaw is the entire story of this film.

"It's seldom we've ever witnessed such a total erasure of self in a role, and it deserves to win him everything, everywhere." Meanwhile the website's New York film editor Ramin Setoodeh wrote that Carell "gives one of the most transformative performances of the year" and predicted he would be up for an Oscar next year. And The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw says Carell has a "superb feel for the role's absurdity and anguish, but stopping short of caricature". Foxcatcher is helmed by Bennett Miller, who directed Moneyball and Philip Seymour Hoffman's Oscar-winning turn in Capote. The story opens on Mark Schultz, Dave's insecure younger brother (Tatum) who has always lived in the shadow of his loving elder sibling (Ruffalo). When, out-of-the-blue, du Pont asks him to move to his estate and help put together a wrestling team for the 1988 Seoul Olympics, Mark jumps at the chance and soon develops a father-son relationship with a man whose dark intensity is instantly unsettling.

Erratic in his moods, du Pont eventually turns on Mark and calls his more confident brother over to the sprawling estate to train the team, along with Dave's wife (Sienna Miller) and two children. Resentful at first, Mark eventually grows close to his brother again whilst du Pont becomes alienated from them, culminating in the tragic murder that made headlines in 1996 when the heir shot Dave Schultz. Critics have also applauded strong performances from Ruffalo and Tatum - the latter better known for romances and action movies. "While Carell may deliver the most transformative turn here, it's merely one of three supremely accomplished performances that connect thrillingly onscreen," Chang said. * Foxcatcher releases in Australian cinemas on December 18 Share or comment on this article Sorry we are not currently accepting comments on this article.

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Simon Cowell and David Walliams make big arrival on DONKEYS as they attend official launch for Britain's Got Talent in Blackpool Head Start to Home Cooked Foxcatcher | John McDonald John McDonald January 31, 2015 Steve Carell in 'Foxcatcher' (2014) Sport in film is invariably used as a way of exploring human ambitions, the dizzy heights of success and the misery of failure. The game is always the game of life with its inevitable winners and losers. There have been sports dramas, comedies and musicals, but Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher is a rare phenomenon: a sporting horror film, in which Steve Carrell plays the mad doctor and Channing Tatum the ingénue. This may sound like a classic B movie, but Foxcatcher is more chiller than thriller – a slow-paced descent into madness set on an isolated estate in Pennsylvania. It is the story of John E. Du Pont (Carell) heir to a great American fortune, born of gunpowder and chemicals. Although he is one of the richest men in the United States, Du Pont is a misfit obsessed with ornithology, guns and wrestling.

He has equipped the family property, Foxcatcher, with a state-of-the art wrestling studio, and aims to host the national team. The problem is that he sees himself as a dream coach and mentor when he is no more than an amateur. It is money, not ability, that lures the wrestlers to Du Pont’s camp. The sole exception may be Mark Schultz (Tatum), a gold medallist at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, who shares the same patriotic values as his patron. Mark is the first convert to Foxcatcher’s stable, but he is a disturbed, introverted personality who has always been chronically dependent on his older brother and fellow champion wrestler, Dave (Mark Ruffalo). Despite his wealth, Du Pont tells Mark that he has never had a friend, apart from a boy his mother hired for that purpose. Mark has been equally friendless, and the two establish a strange kind of friendship with homosexual overtones. While grooming Mark for the Olympics Du Pont introduces him to cocaine and other distractions that mess with his mind. When Du Pont realises Mark is failing, he calls on brother Dave, who soon brings the other wrestlers into line.

Yet Dave is too intelligent to give Du Pont the adulation he craves. Placed in front of a camera and asked to praise his coach and mentor, Dave squirms with discomfort. The connections between Du Pont and both brothers become increasingly strained, finally ending in tragedy. Although he sees himself as a Svengali, Du Pont is a textbook sociopath who talks in a monotone and stares coldly at everyone. It is a stunning performance from Steve Carell, virtually unrecognisable under prosthetic make-up that alters the line of his forehead and nose. Du Pont says people call him the Golden Eagle, as if in recognition of his patriotism, but it is more likely a reference to his beak of a nose. Du Pont radiates an unpleasant aura that makes every human contact forced and unpleasant. His mother (Vanessa Redgrave) who cares only for thoroughbred horses, tells him wrestling is a “low” sport of which she disapproves. For Du Pont it is his only avenue for human contact, as he grapples playfully with the wrestlers in a rather blatant form of sexual sublimation. A scene in which Du Pont demonstrates his coaching expertise in front of his mother will have viewers sinking into their seats in embarrassment.

Much of the story revolves around the personalities of the Schultz brothers, with Mark being painfully inarticulate, given to fits of brooding, or explosive violence; while Dave is the opposite – a family man, a thinker, a natural leader. Mark needs Dave, but has come to resent his own inadequacy. These roles represent a career high point for both Tatum and Ruffalo, who begin the film with a training session that resembles a brotherly embrace, almost a slow dance, but soon turns brutal. Foxcatcher is about the relationships that men form with each other, be they brothers-in-arms or would-be father and son. It examines the painful dynamics of families, from the lop-sided relations of the Schultz brothers, to Du Pont’s woeful attempts to impress his domineering – and disappointed – mother. Finally it is a story about America, where wealth is power, and a rich sociopath can rearrange reality to suit his own delusions. Songs such as This Land is Your Land are included with ironic intent. A slow, starkly-beautiful film, with a minimal score, Foxcatcher has moments of stasis when Du Pont delivers a boring speech.

We are meant to register that boredom, which reveals the speaker’s dissociation from life. The highly physical sport of wrestling becomes a psychological obstacle course for Mark. The faded, perhaps imaginary greatness of America is a problem for everyone. Foxcatcher Foxcatcher » The David Minor Theater - No longer sneaking beer into the movies! by Liam Lacey The title Foxcatcher refers to the 800-acre Pennsylvania estate owned by the wealthy du Pont family, where hunters on horseback chased foxes through the fields and packs of beagles tore the prey to bits. This is the blood sport of the privileged, which Oscar Wilde characterized as “the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible,” which is something of the spirit of Bennett Miller’s superb new film. Foxcatcher Farm is the setting of Miller’s elegiac true-crime drama, only his third feature followingCapote (2005) and Moneyball (2011). At the film’s heart are three unforgettable performances: Channing Tatum, doing the best work of his career as the physically powerful but emotionally vulnerable Olympic wrestler, Mark Schultz; Mark Ruffalo, deeply empathetic as usual, plays his shrewd, modest older brother, Dave.

And the performance that set the press abuzz at Cannes, where the film premiered last May, comes from an unrecognizable Steve Carell, as John Eleuthère du Pont, a multimillionaire heir to the Du Pont fortune. With a prosthetic nose, shaved eyebrows and a pinched vocal delivery, he suggests an anthropomorphized bird of prey, and, indeed, asks to be known as “the Eagle.” The three performances are anchored by a fiercely concentrated script from Dan Futterman (Capote) and E. Max Frye (Something Wild), which reveals the changing relationship of the three men over nine years, incrementally revealing layers of madness, privilege, repressed sexuality and eventual violence. We see this story through the eyes of Mark Schultz (the script is indebted both to Mark Schultz’s co-authored memoir, Foxcatcher, and Tim Huddleston’s Wrestling with Madness). Three years after winning gold at the Los Angeles Olympics, he’s living in a rundown apartment, living on instant noodles and honorariums from speaking engagements at local elementary schools. His older brother, Dave (Ruffalo), is his only real friend and coach.

Everything you need to know about their relationship – the intimacy, the rivalry, the speed and violence of the sport they love – is captured in the opening scene: a prolonged practice session between the two brothers in an empty gym. Now Dave wants to take a university coaching job in Colorado with his wife, Nancy (Sienna Miller), and their children, and Mark is at a low point. Then Mark gets a call to come visit the Philadelphia estate: A first-class plane ticket and then a helicopter ride to the estate, where a wrestling camp will be based. Du Pont is obviously an oddball whose conversation is a free-association: He calls the lack of support for athletes “the canary in the coal mine,” which causes him to jump to a discussion of his love of ornithology, then back to how he wants to help America “soar again.” Mark nods along. Shortly after, he’s installed in a sprawling chalet built on the property. The amenities are grand, the mood gothic. The arrangement has the the fairy-tale weirdness of Beauty and the Beast, except the beauty is a hulking wrestler and the beast an awkward, slope-shouldered weakling.

Mark is given strict instructions by security staff: If, while wandering around the estate, Mark should encounter John’s imperious mother (Vanessa Redgrave) he is to ignore her. Under no circumstances, unless invited, is he to enter the main house. The horse-dotted fields are lush and the woods marked with running trails, but the mood is Hitchcockian: There are echoes of the 1940 marriage-thriller Rebecca, or even Psycho here. John is entwined in a needy, antagonistic relationship with his disapproving mother. She thinks wrestling is “low;” he thinks horses are “dumb.” His goal, initially, is to help Mark prepare for the world wrestling championships and then the 1988 Seoul Olympics. By now, the wrestling camp has grown into a facility of a dozen or more wrestlers. There’s a lot of horseplay between “Coach” du Pont and his team, all dressed in Team Foxcatcher sweats. There are pats of encouragement that linger awkwardly and late-night personal wrestling practices. Du Pont’s unsettling vocal rhythms and mannerisms – staring off into space for a moment when he’s displeased – grow increasingly unnerving.

Du Pont introduces Mark to cocaine, which gives us the only scene in the movie where we’re reminded of Steve Carell, the comedian. While snorting lines and flying a helicopter, he goes over a speech he has written for Mark, extolling du Pont’s achievements: “Ornithologist, philatelist, philanthropist,” he chants. When Mark, predictably, begins to slip as an athlete, du Pont turns on him. Du Pont next persuades older brother Dave and his family to come stay at the Foxcatcher Farm, offering a salaried head-coaching position. But Mark is doing worse than ever. At the 1988 Olympic trials, Mark is a mess – he goes on an eating binge after blowing a match – and Dave struggles to help him, while mediating with du Pont. But by now du Pont is in another orbit, ordering a tank-sized artillery gun and carrying a handgun with him, even to the gym. But then, the Du Pont family built up one of the longest-running fortunes in American history by manufacturing gun-powder for the American Civil War. The tragedy that eventually happened at Foxcatcher Farm in January, 1996, almost seemed predestined.

The world of Foxcatcher is a deeply lonely place. The desaturated cinematography is chilly and flat. The gyms and hotel rooms are impersonal and unglamorous while the Foxcatcher house is spacious and expensive to the point of absurdity. The film offers no explanation for what happened in the storm raging in John du Pont’s head, but the circumstances of the crime are familiar, a distillation of what’s in front of our eyes on TV every night: The perilous wealth gap; blowhards with millions treated like media oracles; arms manufacturers spouting patriotism and athletic pride co-opted by corporate patrons. It’s a dog-eat-fox world, and a terrible way to treat people or other animals. The triumph of Foxcatcher is not in the subject but in its art. The clear-eyed compassion and moral intelligence of Miller’s film brings sense to the senseless, and finds the human pulse behind the tabloid shock. It’s not a movie to make you feel good, but, at moments, it reminds you what goodness is.

Foxcatcher Foxcatcher Sad, sinister, strange – a sporting tale that will leave you short of breath Written by Matt Warren Wrestling, singlets… and a deliriously large prosthetic nose. Perhaps not the most likely ingredients for a film tipped to pick up an Academy Award or two. And yet there is something spookily, strangely, sadly compelling about this tale of a bonkers billionaire whose obsession with men grappling one another leads him to a state of murderous paranoia. Remarkably, Foxcatcher is based on a true story. I say remarkably because you really couldn’t make it up. Not because it features time travel, ghouls or a Gordian plot twist, but simply because it reminds us just how weird some people can be. John E du Pont, played by Steve Carell (and his prosthetic nose) is late-20th-century America’s answer to Tolkien’s Smaug, a stupendously rich but humourless reptile living the solitary life in his very own Philadelphia Main Line Lonely Mountain: 800-acre Foxcatcher Farm. He birdwatches. He receives uncomfortable and humiliating visits from his wheelchair-bound mother (Vanessa Redgrave). He birdwatches some more.

But he also loves wrestling – perhaps a little too much. And so his beady eyes come to rest on 1984 Olympic gold-medal winning brothers Mark (Channing Tatum) and Dave (the ever-likeable Mark Ruffalo) Schultz. Younger, weaker brother Mark, in particular, is hardly living the life of the all-American hero. He subsists in a dreary apartment, spending his evenings alone, eating TV dinners and playing Pac-Man – pick your sport more carefully if you want your nation’s adoration. John, however, has bigger ideas and creepily invites Mark to train at his Foxcatcher wrestling facility, housed in the type of place only bad things happen. Mark is stupid or desperate or both, though, and is seduced by the tycoon’s promise of riches and further Olympic glory. For a while, the good times roll. Mark wins the World Championships and flies around in helicopters. Du Pont gets to be the ‘Big Daddy’. Before long, Dave is on the show, too. All is almost well. Until… I won’t reveal more, but then plot isn’t central to director Bennet Miller’s film anyway. It’s about character.

Playing against type, comedian Steve Carell excels as the WASP Ozymandias – an empty vessel who endlessly window shops for love and admiration, the only two things he can’t write a cheque for. His proboscis may win the Oscar yet. Tatum, meanwhile, captures perfectly the apish, jealous and malleable melancholic who tries to step out of his older brother’s shadow only to become the puppet of a new master. It’s when Carell and Tatum are on screen together, however, that the film really finds its stride; they’re a double act so odd, so uncomfortable, so sinister that you can’t help but watch. On the downside, Foxcatcher is gloomy, overlong and largely about wrestling. But at a time when many films cross galaxies and employ endless special effects to draw audiences, this dares simply to be a movie about people. And that deserves applause.

Related tags: Steve Carell In 'Foxcatcher' Is The Year's First Oscar Contender | The Huffington Post Steve Carell In 'Foxcatcher' Is The Year's First Oscar Contender 05/19/2014 11:40 am ET | Updated May 20, 2014 320 Christopher Rosen Managing entertainment editor, The Huffington Post It's only May 19, but with the world premiere of "Foxcatcher" having occurred at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival on Monday, Oscar season has started its all-encompassing engines. "Foxcatcher," which was pushed out of 2013 to allow director Bennett Miller time to finish (and to get the film away from "12 Years A Slave" and "Gravity"), is already being hailed as "an enormous film" and "a superb tragicomedy of the beta-male" ; some critics have even compared Miller's film to Paul Thomas Anderson's "The Master." At the center of "Foxcatcher" is Steve Carell. The nominal comic actor plays John E.

du Pont in the film, a millionaire who suffered from mental illness and murdered Dave Schultz (Mark Ruffalo), a gold-medal winning wrestler, in 1996. (Channing Tatum plays Dave's brother, fellow wrestler Mark Schultz, and the film is filtered through his perspective.) It has long been assumed that Carell would be an Oscar contender for the part -- he's almost unrecognizable, thanks to a prosthetic nose and bizarre speaking voice -- and, sure enough, that's the early consensus. J. Bryan Lowder is a Slate associate editor. He covers life, culture, and LGBTQ issues. Advertisement To be fair, some critics have wondered aloud about the film’s “hints” at homoeroticism, but they have ultimately shied away from going further. They would likely suggest that Foxcatcher is “about” other issues: addiction, mental illness, the mentor-mentee relationship, the excesses of the 1 percent, and possibly some hazy Deep Truths about American culture.

Those elements are probably in there somewhere, but it’s the gay subtext—in this case, the age-old story of a wealthy, effete fairy going after rough trade —that feels most central, most necessary for the movie to make whatever narrative sense it does. Before I unpack the fairy/trade dynamic further, a little necessary background on the film. My colleague Aisha Harris has looked into the accuracy question and found the movie is fairly faithful —at least in terms of bare outline—to the events on which it is based. Channing Tatum’s Mark Schultz and Mark Ruffalo’s David Schultz really were Olympic gold-medal-toting wrestlers (and brothers) in the 1980s, and Steve Carell’s be-schnozzed John du Pont really did launch and recruit for a wrestling training program on his family’s manor near Valley Forge in Pennsylvania, the eventual aim being to take Mark and his “Foxcatcher” team to the 1988 Olympic Games.* And perhaps most important, du Pont really did kill Dave Schultz in cold blood—though about seven years later than the movie’s ambiguous editing implies.

These historical plot points aside, Miller spends most of his film rhapsodizing on the troubled relationship between du Pont and his new toy Mark, an (over)grown man with the injured-yet-credulous soul of an abused puppy. If I made supercuts, I’d make one of the many minutes of tape in which Carell gazes luridly over his prosthetic nose at Tatum’s physique from some darkened corner or couch, and I’d punctuate it with actual lines from the film like “you look good—strong, fit,” and “excellent bed—good mattress, firm.” And if I were forced to spell out the tortured metaphor that Miller insists on advancing throughout the movie, I’d explain that Mark is a fine specimen of man-flesh that du Pont really, really wants to ride. (Mother raises horses; shouldn’t sonny have a thoroughbred of his own?) By Foxcatcher’s logic, the reason du Pont shoots David in the end is essentially because brothers get to nuzzle one another and if-I-can’t-pet-him-no-one-can.

It’s crucial to note that all of this fictionalized material represents a striking departure from most interpretations of the real-world events, both in terms of how observers made sense of them at the time and how Mark himself viewed them in his memoir. Harris hits on two big examples of this in her post: In the movie, John’s mother (played by Vanessa Redgrave), for instance, is portrayed as the driving force behind his insecurities, while in the book Schultz does not recall her being a significant factor in du Pont’s behavior. Most notably, perhaps, the movie makes no mention of du Pont’s diagnosis with paranoid schizophrenia, which, at his trial, was offered as an explanation for the murder. Advertisement I cannot overstate the impact of these divergences. Leaving the mother issue aside for a moment, had Miller presented du Pont as suffering from schizophrenia either through some mode of medical intervention or scenes of truly erratic behavior (for most of the film he just seems eccentric, creepy, weird, or some combination of the three), Foxcatcher would have been a very different movie—certainly a much less ominous one.

When mentally ill people act strangely, they do it for a clear, rather boring reason; fictionalized du Pont’s motivations are, on the contrary, flirtatiously subtle. And the most vexing aspect of this obfuscation is that it was not done due to a lack of compelling biographical material: As Harris notes, there exist many accounts of du Pont’s obviously paranoid episodes (for example, he thought treadmills were time machines), none of which appear in the film. But then, none of these read as crypto-gay either. Schultz writes in his memoir that “I had my suspicions [that du Pont might be gay], but I never observed … anything that would cause me to say he was a homosexual. I never knew of any relationships he had with guys.” Miller and his team had a choice in how they colored du Pont’s psychology—apparently perverse proved a more attractive shade than plain old disturbed. Which brings me back to rough trade. If du Pont is the perverted fairy-aristocrat in the dynamic I described earlier, then Mark is the trade. The term will be familiar to many gay readers, but perhaps less so to others, so here’s a quick introduction.

Trade is a slang word from Polari , a gay English dialect popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries that’s mostly died out now save for a few expressions. The term generally refers to a masculine-presenting man who is not gay-identified, but who will have sex with gay men for money or social status. Usage varies, but “rough trade” usually carries with it a working-class connotation—dock workers, day laborers, military grunts, and stable boys are all classic examples—as well as a suggestion of brutish threat: The only reward for your investment and services rendered may be an ass-kicking. After Foxcatcher, I think we can safely add “struggling wrestler” to the category. Even if you didn’t consciously know about the fairy/trade dynamic before, you’ve almost certainly picked it up along the way as a cultural trope, a lazy way of representing gay male relationships as predatory—and therein lies my problem with this movie. It’s not that a trade-based relationship is necessarily off-limits; it’s that in 2014 the most basic version of the dynamic cannot be the motivating force of an entire story (that’s not set in 1890s London).

Miller’s John du Pont and Mark Schultz could have had a similar relationship and yet been more than a bad stereotype if either character had any depth at all—the trade dynamic is certainly open to complication. But as Harris points out in her post, Foxcatcher weirdly elides almost all of du Pont’s backstory, and what little we get of Mark’s isn’t all that humanizing. Advertisement Indeed, in du Pont’s case, Freud basically makes a cameo in the form of the overbearing, disapproving mother figure who frets over her adult son’s train set and is made dyspeptic by the sight of her boy getting “low” on the mat with other men. Dysfunction was inevitable, obviously, and Carell’s sallow styling and limp-wristed jogging really is masterful—if what you’re after is a two-dimensional portrait of the Victorian invert . Miller’s only real innovation to the archetype is to give us a figure who trades the stable boy for a whole stable (because horses!) of boys. Meanwhile, Mark—the film’s ostensible tragic figure—may have meat on his bones, but there’s hardly enough flesh on the part to make us care.

Tatum performs well as unruly livestock, gamely having his spirit broken by du Pont in a disturbing late-night humping encounter and appearing moments later in booty shorts and inexplicable frosted tips, snorting some blow up his perfectly rugged nose on the veranda. Sure, he might bristle at the bridle from time to time (trade always does), but those $10,000 bonus checks aren’t so bad, right? These unimaginative characterizations are disappointing, to be sure. But what really soured Foxcatcher for me (aside from discovering that so much of this stuff arose from artistic choice rather than historical fact) was Miller’s insistence that the true cost of this gay drama was not to du Pont or even Mark, but to the heterosexual family. I would apologize to my theater companions for audibly groaning when the camera drifted, dirge-like, over the word “KIDS” scrawled in ink on David’s hand and past a display of his wedding photo and cake topper as straight wholesomeness—I mean he—bled out on the snow, but I would not be sincere. Message received. Top Comment This is such crap- sometimes I get so sick of the gays (fyi I am gay) .

Hello- the film is set in another time and subtext of uptight privilege. The homosexual undertone is creepy but that's the point. More... -Marc Huestis MOVIE REVIEW: Ambition and money make for a dangerous mix in new Bennett Miller film - The Tech MOVIE REVIEW: Ambition and money make for a dangerous mix in new Bennett Miller film Miller’s long-awaited third film showcases dark and powerful performances in a thrilling, true American tragedy Starring Steve Carell, Channing Tatum, Mark Ruffalo, Siena Miller, and Vanessa Redgrave Rated R Now Playing Based on a true story, Foxcatcher tells the story of schizophrenic millionaire John E. du Pont (Steve Carell) and his involvement with Olympic Gold medalists David (Mark Ruffalo) and Mark Schulz (Channing Tatum). Du Pont, heir to the du Pont chemical company, invites Mark, who has been living under his older brother’s shadow, to train for the 1988 Olympics at his private horse breeding farm, Foxcatcher. Powered by family feuds, personal ambitions and strong performances, Foxcatcher is a thrilling recount of an American tragedy. Du Pont’s invitation surprises the siblings.

“What does he get out of all of this?” asks David, the more mature of them, skeptically. “America winning” answers Mark, lured by du Pont’s patriotic speech. But what he doesn’t know is that du Pont himself, in his deluded vision of the world, has ambitions of his own. He wants to impress his mother, who has filled every shelf of their mansion with beautiful trophies earned by her Welsh ponies. In a strange way, du Pont treats the athletes as the horses bred at Foxcatcher. In one scene he exhibits Schulz as a trophy to other wealthy men, saying “Have you ever met an Olympic Gold medalist?” He believes himself patriot whose mission is to restore hope in the American people. The movie has many darkly comedic moments of the bombastic du Pont interlaced with the dramatic backdrop. In a particularly memorable scene, while riding a helicopter to a dinner party, du Pont introduces Mark to cocaine. “Straight down the nose” he says casually. These scenes are comical, not by intention of the writers, but because the events themselves are ludicrous and truly highlight du Pont’s vain and demented personality. Yet the film skips a number of years between events, leaving many unanswered questions.

For instance, it is unclear how du Pont convinced David to coach the National team in Foxcatcher when he had previously rejected the offer to train there. Similarly, the film makes a large jump from 1988 to 1996, the year in which du Pont assassinates David Schulz. I imagine these gaps arose from large edits during post-production. The film was rumored to originally last over three and a half hours, a little over a third of its final duration of two hours and ten minutes. The story relies heavily on the strengths of its cast. Steve Carell’s performance is both frightening and opaque, which diverges from previous roles such as that of a clumsy weatherman (Anchorman) or a tender geek (40 Year Old Virgin). While this is not his first dramatic role, it definitely marks his darkest turn to date as the eccentric billionaire with delusions of grandeur. He is unrecognizable under a large amount of make up, a prosthetic nose and constant heavy breathing. He is at times very soft spoken and inspiring, and at others irascible and volatile. Carell deftly conveys the removal from reality that characterizes du Pont’s schizophrenia.

Channing Tatum offers a window into the troubled mind of Mark Schulz, a young man who is obsessed with beating his brother and will stop at nothing. Mark Ruffalo delivers a caring and forgiving performance as David, almost as if he were a father to his brother Mark. Vanessa Redgrave, who plays du Pont’s mother, and Siena Miller, who plays David’s wife, round out this spectacular cast. Suffice to say that the trio of Carell, Ruffalo, and Tatum are strong contenders for Oscar nominations. This buzz shouldn’t be a surprise to those familiar with Bennett Miller’s work. Miller previously directed Phillip Seymour Hoffman to his Academy Award win in Capote, and three other actors (Brad Pitt, Catherine Keener and Jonah Hill) have earned nominations from participation in his works. Foxcatcher also reunites Miller with Capote’s screenwriter, Dan Futterman. I expect this movie to be a top contender at the Academy Awards.

Cannes Film Festival 2014: Foxcatcher Review | The House Next Door | Slant Magazine Cannes Film Festival 2014: Foxcatcher Review Comments (0) Enervated to the point of somnolence, Bennett Miller's Foxcatcher squanders inherently intriguing material—the murder of Olympic gold medalist David Schultz by eccentric scion John E. du Pont—by sapping it of any dramatic or satiric potential in favor of a smothering mood of muted solemnity. And I do mean muted: Miller favors repeated sequences where the diegetic sound dips to the threshold of audibility so that composer Mychael Danna (the same culprit behind The Captive 's bombastic score) has free reign to do his best Arvo Part impersonation. What we're left with is a sluggish, molasses-y storyline showcasing two solid actors (Mark Ruffalo and Channing Tatum as brothers Dave and Mark Schultz), and Steve Carell, hiding behind a Mr. Burns-esque prosthetic nose and the beady, carrion-eager eyes of a peregrine falcon, doing what amounts to a feature-length SNL impression.

Vanessa Redgrave turns up briefly, just long enough to advise John as to the terribly “low” nature of his preferred sport and then to glower disapprovingly at the grappling combatants. A director other than Miller, whose nose for Oscar bait is every bit as predatory as some of ornithologist du Pont's glass-enclosed specimens, might have decided (sensibly enough) to play to Carell's strengths and fashion the material into a dark comedy. In an alternate universe wherein the cinema gods aren't crazy, Steven Soderbergh might have turned this into a curdled companion piece to his Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra . Instead, we're treated to the Miller method: numerous long-shots of characters sitting alone in their rooms like insects trapped in amber, brooding about the terrible intensity of it all, and even more portentous close-ups of du Pont and his thousand-yard-stare glaring out a window, seemingly registering absolutely nothing at all. Once in a while, almost as though by accident, a character will do or say something remotely amusing, which, without fail, will be Miller's cue to bring the sound down and slather on some more Danna from heaven.

As a consequence of Miller's relentless de-dramatization, Foxcatcher offers us next to nothing of utility or complexity about du Pont's pathology, beyond a mother fixation that would make Norman Bates blush and a high-caliber fascination with firearms, which, after all, is how the du Pont clan first acquired their filthy lucre, as the VHS tape du Pont encourages Mark to watch so brazenly trumpets. Ruffalo does well by his undercooked role of doomed Dave Schultz, adding layer and nuance to this salt-of-the-earth type, whose essential goodness and decency is indicated by his receding hairline. Meanwhile, the younger brother played by Tatum is marked out by his shambling gait and penchant for self-harm. An assemblage of tics do not a character make. Because it rather complacently settles for caricature without comedy, intrigue without any insight, Foxcatcher will invariably invite a certain amount of speculation that the filmmakers should have let this one get away. The Cannes Film Festival runs from May 14—25. Foxcatcher | Dale M. Pollock Foxcatcher Post on January 26, 2015 by Dale M.

Pollock Movie a Day Blog constantly surprises ourselves by the films we neglected to write about when we first saw them. The latest, and a significant Academy Awards contender, is FOXCATCHER (2014, Theatrical), Bennett Miller’s meditative essay on money, power and sex, all among men. Miller is almost 50 but has only directed four feature films, including FOXCATCHER. With these, however, he has directed six actors to Oscar nominations, including Steve Carrel and Mark Ruffalo for FOXCATCHER. He has also nabbed two Best Director nominations, also for FOXCATCHER and CAPOTE (2005). His other outstanding film is MONEYBALL (2011), so in terms of intelligent filmmaking and positive critical reception, Miller is batting 1,000. A Miller film only comes along every three to five years, so there was great anticipation for FOXCATCHER, and it largely lives up to its advance billing, once again especially strong in the area of performance.

Carrell plays a multimillionaire wrestling fan who has gross and unexamined feelings of attraction to his young charges, and Ruffalo is the older wrestler who gets caught in Carrell’s web, as does his younger sibling, played by Channing Tatum. For me, the biggest surprise was Tatum, who in my estimation deserved a nominationmore than did Carrell or Ruffalo. His construct of an inarticulate, wholly physical young man unable to communicate with anything other than his body was deep and penetrating, and makes FOXCATCHER particularly compelling watching. The story is a true one, as super-wealthy John E. du Pont set up a training academy for U.S. wrestlers in anticipation of the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, Korea. Carrell, sporting a prosthetic nose that distracts from every scene he’s in, recruits the gold medal-winning tandem of Mark (Tatum) and Dave (Ruffalo) Schultz to lead the team and provide Carrell with an infinite amount of fantasy material about virile young man grappling with each other in long underwear.

In one memorably creepy scene, set in Carrell’s egotistical trophy room, he physically body surfs over the group of young men horsing around and grabbing at each other. It made me want to take a shower. Carrell has a smorgasbord of hang-ups, the principal one being his disappointed mother, Vanessa Redgrave, who fears she might have nourished a monster at her breast (figuratively speaking, of course!). Redgrave has only two scenes in FOXCATCHER, and in one of them she doesn’t even speak, but the final look she bestows on Carrell is somewhere between disdain and loathing, and we can see its impact on him and his neuroses. Miller adopts a deliberate pace, and never uses the neon flashing lights that point to “important” scenes in movies such as THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING (2014, Movie a Day 1/19/15). His style is unobtrusive, rarely visually flashy and relies on what the actors bring to the moment, as much as the script or the direction.

FOXCATCHER will not be everyone’s cup of tea; Miller is not looking to make an audience picture out of this sordid tale that ends in tragedy, although the facts would have certainly permitted him to. Instead, he thinks aloud, with his camera, his actors, their dialogue and the story they’re telling, about what makes people act the way they do, and what are the consequences of their actions. It’s not easy to contemplate with equanimity the decisions the major characters in FOXCATCHER make, but that produces a film all the more bolder and ambitious. Miller dares us to imagine ourselves as people we might never want to know otherwise, and that’s what great movies do. Movie a Day Blog Archive Movie review: ‘Foxcatcher’ is a quietly devastating drama, and a game-changer for its stars - The Boston Globe Advertisement Director Bennett Miller (“Moneyball,” “Capote”) could have made a three-ring circus of this story, pushing the weirdness and driving home his points about the evil, idle rich. Instead, “Foxcatcher” is measured and mournful, sometimes to a fault.

Carell, unrecognizable behind a prosthetic nose and pallid skin, catches the flabbiness of a man so advantaged he has never been tested; it’s a career-changer of a performance, and the actor will doubtless have nominations and such coming his way. As Dave Schultz, the older and more settled of the brothers, Mark Ruffalo is guilelessly likable — the only character in the film who moves easily through the world. In du Pont’s eyes, that may have been Schultz’s crime. We expect expert acting from Ruffalo, and we get it, but the secret hero of “Foxcatcher” — and the performance you keep coming back to — is Channing Tatum as Mark, a lost boy in the skin of a brute. In a story about vanished and vanquished fathers, Mark is the most abject son of all. When we first see him, he’s in an empty practice room, wrestling with all his might against a faceless dummy. It’s an image that haunts the rest of the film. Get The Weekender in your inbox: The Globe's top picks for what to see and do each weekend, in Boston and beyond. Sign Up Thank you for signing up!

Sign up for more newsletters here “Foxcatcher” dramatizes how Mark, in the wake of the brothers both winning gold medals at the 1984 Olympics, returned to a life of barely scraping by, speaking to auditoriums of bored schoolchildren until du Pont invited him to his private wrestling center at Foxcatcher Farms. A millionaire recluse, du Pont fancied himself a patron and a patriot, and he saw the sport — the most elemental of athletic competitions — as a way to prove his merit in the eyes of his distant mother (Vanessa Redgrave). The latter was a champion equestrian and breeder, and an early scene lets her son get off a rant about the general uselessness of horses. It’s the tip of a large, angry iceberg. Foxcatcher Steve Carell wins in ‘Foxcatcher’ Du Pont installs Mark in a house on the estate, angling to bring Dave into his orbit as head coach. The sequences of Mark navigating this vast fishbowl of privilege, marveling at its comforts, soaking up his mentor’s cracked theories of how the country has lost its way, are both creepy and comical.

Du Pont has countless attendants and employees, yet, like Mark, he’s almost cosmically alone. The older man tells his pupil to call him “Eagle,” buys him clothes, and, after a while, plies him with cocaine. “Foxcatcher” went through a lengthy editing process, and there are reports of early test screenings that ran for more than three hours. You feel chapters missing here and there in the final cut; in particular, Mark’s descent into decadence and rent-boy bleached highlights happens rather quickly. Elsewhere, the film is steady in its grip. Advertisement A US team is assembled, Dave moves his wife (Sienna Miller) and children to Foxcatcher, and there’s an overseas meet that goes badly for Mark. His response is to batter the walls of his hotel room and eat until the bloat sets in. It’s a frightening scene — something out of “Raging Bull: The Early Years” — and Tatum is remarkable in it, an inarticulate giant writhing in pain over what he sees as a betrayal by his two father figures, brother and sponsor.

Scott Garfield, Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics Channing Tatum (left) and Mark Ruffalo play the Schultz brothers, wrestling gold medalists who fell into the orbit of an unstable du Pont heir. Carell’s du Pont has his own demons. The Founding Fathers themselves stare down from the walls of Foxcatcher Farms, and they are unforgiving. Greg Fraser’s camerawork is like a tour of a well-kept crypt and the score by Rob Simonsen throbs with discreet strings. Working from a script by E. Max Frye and Dan Futterman, director Miller buries the pop-Freudianisms in the subtext and lets the characters’ behavior define them: Mark punching his own face in impotent fury, du Pont signing up for an “old-timer’s” wrestling meet in which his opponent has been paid to lose, Dave caving to pressure to laud his boss in a promotional video. The sin at the bottom of this tale isn’t that du Pont’s money can buy what achievement can’t — it’s that he thinks it should. Above all, this is a terribly sad film, and that may wear some audiences out.

Miller sees John du Pont as a ghost for an America that no longer exists, yet he walks through it still, pistol at his side, limo trailing behind. Carell’s performance is appropriately respectful and quietly mad, no more so than in the scene — perhaps the most strangely emotional moment in a deeply strange film — in which du Pont goes to the stables to free his mother’s horses, one more lost boy chasing his parents into the dawn. The real John E. du Pont was, by some accounts, a lot crazier than the one we see in “Foxcatcher,” but that’s not really what the movie’s after. It’s in his nearness to Mark Schultz’s aloneness, and perhaps our own, that this deluded little man seems most human. Related coverage:

Question: Almost unrecognisable with a prosthetic nose, who plays John E. du Pont in 'Foxcatcher'?
Answer: Steve CARRELL