Foxcatcher (Bennett Miller, 2014)

[Professor Wagstaff]

Bennet Miller's "Foxcatcher" teaser trailer. The release has been bumped from December 2013 to an undisclosed date in 2014. Watch this before Sony Pictures Classic kills the link.

[domino harvey]

Bennet Miller's "Foxcatcher" teaser trailer. The release has been bumped from December 2013 to an undisclosed date in 2014. Watch this before Sony Pictures Classic kills the link.

Probably a wise move since this awards season has become more overstuffed than usual and this has a lot of potential to garner awards in a less-crowded arena

[perkizitore]

A film starring Channing Tatum has the potential to garner awards?
Well, there are the Razzies now you mention it.

[knives]

I think that sort of joke stopped even being in consideration for valid a few years back.

[swo17]

Is Jude Law in this? That guy's in, like, everything.

[Professor Wagstaff]

Any reason this thread is called "Foxfire" and not "Foxcatcher"?

[knives]

Because that's a less stupid name.

[domino harvey]

Any reason this thread is called "Foxfire" and not "Foxcatcher"?

Whoops. I've changed it to its proper title, ChromeGoogle

[Jeff]

A film starring Channing Tatum has the potential to garner awards?

I think most of the buzz is for Carrell's performance, but good directors have found ways to use Tatum effectively, and Bennett Miller is as good at coaxing great performances out of actors as anyone. I agree that the move is probably a wise one. I think studios have actually started conceding the year to 12 Years A Slave, with Gravity taking most of the techs and leftovers.

Any reason this thread is called "Foxfire" and not "Foxcatcher"?

There probably is going to be some degree of title confusion with Laurent Cantet's Foxfire in circulation at roughly the same time.

Because that's a less stupid name.

Take it up with the du Ponts.

[knives]

Ugg, you just made me realize whatsherface is probably going to win an other oscar. Please let Blanchett (or anyone else) win instead.

[flyonthewall2983]

November 14th

[warren oates]

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

SpoilerShow

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.

[D50]

If you've seen it, what city did you see this in?

I've been checking google movies almost every day. Can't seem to find the theatrical release date (must be past) on IMDB.

[Noiradelic]

See two posts above.

[Jeff]

If you've seen it, what city did you see this in?

You can see a list of current and upcoming cities here. It opened in Denver yesterday, and it's pretty fantastic. It's getting a fairly slow rollout, so if you live in a smaller market, it may be January 16 before it opens near you.

[D50]

If you've seen it, what city did you see this in?

You can see a list of current and upcoming cities here. It opened in Denver yesterday, and it's pretty fantastic. It's getting a fairly slow rollout, so if you live in a smaller market, it may be January 16 before it opens near you.

Thanks! Looks like January 19.

[mfunk9786]

What dragged Bennett Miller's previous film down for me truly propped this one up: He's a guy who makes films about true life events, and does a lot of meddling with timelines and facts, particularly excluding very notable influences on what he's showing the audience in order to craft the film he wants. In Moneyball, playing fast and loose with a recent Major League Baseball season by conveniently ignoring the fact that the Oakland A's had a historically great pitching staff, among other things, made the entire product feel watered down - instead of getting to the truth of his subject, it instead felt like puffery designed to make a celebration of statistics work by ignoring a whole lot of them - muddling the final result. In Foxcatcher, Miller again works with a relatively recent occurrence, but instead of reminding the audience that "hey, a lot of years passed between what you're seeing early on and when this happened" or "hey, remember that John du Pont began to exhibit increasingly bizarre behavior leading up to this," Miller picked his spots, paring what could have been a Fincher-esque true crime potboiler with a ton of information and curiosities down into a character piece. Miller's less concerned with showing us 20 minutes of the 2-day police standoff leading up to du Pont's arrest, for example, than he is with showing us 20 more minutes of who du Pont is - there really is no explanation as to why du Pont did what he did that was verbally stated by him, placed on the record as it were - so Miller decides to explore the overall truth of who this man was and what may drive someone to the point of true madness. By wallowing in du Pont's fraudulence - giving us a simultaneously safe and unsettling distance through Channing Tatum's Mark - we feel as if we can shrug our shoulders as this nearly inexplicable and cruel act occurs and think "Oh, of course he did this. What else would a man like that have done?"

Miller allows the viewer to peel layers away from this deeply damaged person with their imagination: Foxcatcher is the stuff of nightmares, not of long-form crime reporting. If this were Zodiac, and someone made a relatively abstract movie about some fictional suspect and what might have driven him to commit those crimes? That's an event that has so much going on around it, so much amazing writing, so many complex theories - it just would not be the correct approach, much like Moneyball was too minimal for what Miller was adapting. But with this particular case, where we know every one of the facts but we truly know none of the motivations behind the act - where they've literally died with the perpetrator - I can't imagine telling a story about this event any other way. I haven't even mentioned how great the three lead performances are (particularly Tatum's), and the next-level direction from Miller throughout (most of it feels like as close to Haneke as a Hollywood filmmaker is ever going to be allowed to get in terms of its sparseness): There's so much here to pour over and discuss, for a movie that takes such a quiet, modest approach to showing us the sins of excess. I left Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street last year feeling as if I had wrung everything out of it that I needed, but Foxcatcher has forced me to read more, discover more, discuss more. I think I prefer the latter, if pressed.

[hearthesilence]

Interesting. I still haven't seen this, but a friend of mine who was also familiar with the story told me that the film never mentions paranoid schizophrenia, which was the eventual diagnosis on John Du Pont. I think he said that the film never once discusses the fact that John Du Pont is mentally ill and even omits known incidents that would've clearly suggested this. At most, he's seen as eccentric. Again, I've yet to see the film myself, but his take on it was that the film purposely did this to shift focus on to issues of legacy and class, i.e. ideas Miller was primarily interested in exploring through this story rather than doing a straight re-enactment.

[mfunk9786]

The film portrays it as being a much more interesting "fraud realizes how much of a fraud he is" situation (and that's really simplifying things), and the actual act is given very little explanation. But the beauty of the film is that even without taking later diagnoses into consideration, we can see exactly why this small man did this miserable thing, to the point where it needs no further analysis or epilogue on screen. A senseless act is treated as a senseless act for once, as much as people like to throw that word around when something horrible happens. We've got a man whose entire life is a sham, and we see how he lashes out, but we need to build the connective tissue between those two things ourselves as viewers, which makes the whole enterprise feel more compelling and timeless than it would have if this were just a true crime story that played everything straight. It's sort of got a Last Days element to it, had that film not been so dedicated with beating the viewer about the head with Cobain's boredom - there's a compelling story and protagonist to go with this film's minimalism.

[warren oates]

I like mfunk's reading of Miller's deliberate omission of the real du Pont's real madness. It seems almost impossible to imagine him exploring what interests him in the material without cutting this stuff out. Injecting the notion of identifiable clinical madness would endanger Miller's take on the character as someone who might well have acted in much the same way in his legally "right" mind for reasons that were entirely within his control. The true crime elements of the ending play like they are both the inevitable horror that this horror film about everyday life on the du Pont estate is building toward and a tiny coda to the main drama, almost an afterthought, more whimper than bang.

[swo17]

Isn't clinical madness just the sort of thing that tips one over from being someone who is simply motivated to commit a heinous crime like this and someone who actually does it? Is there such a thing as a person who would do this without being driven by some sort of emotional imbalance? Does every movie depicting bad behavior need to have a Psycho doctor at the end?

[warren oates]

I'm tempted to domino-esquely one-word this reply: "no." But, sure, if you will, there's an important distinction between clinical "madness" (in its many forms, from neuroses to psychoses, addictions to personality disorders like narcissism) and legal sanity (literally not understanding reality -- thinking you're shooting a purple monster with a laser instead of a person with a gun, or, in even more locales, simply not knowing right from wrong), all of which the evidence strongly suggests the real du Pont would have fit (whether he was ultimately found legally sane or the weird compromise of "guilty but mentally ill" that muddies the waters further). Miller's film is all about how the extraordinary ordinariness of du Pont's petty personality could have driven someone like this to do what he did even in the absence of serious clinical or legal insanity, which, for the purposes of his story, his take on these characters and his theme, is beside the point. For Miller, I'd say that the much more obvious madness of du Pont's crime in real life overwhelms and obscures the subtler more insidious everyday craziness of his life up to that moment.

Being something more quantifiable than a jerk -- like Foxcatcher's du Pont as spoiled egotist (mommy attachment issues, likely Narcissistic Personality) -- to the DSM doesn't necessarily mean you don't have your agency -- clinically, legally or narratively (that is, in dramatic terms, as a character who can decide what to do).

[hearthesilence]

Isn't clinical madness just the sort of thing that tips one over from being someone who is simply motivated to commit a heinous crime like this and someone who actually does it? Is there such a thing as a person who would do this without being driven by some sort of emotional imbalance? Does every movie depicting bad behavior need to have a Psycho doctor at the end?

All good points. That's why I wonder if this film can only work as a metaphorical story rather than as reportage, partly because murder may not be plausibly inevitable if John Du Pont was completely sane.

Beyond those elements, I can see how Miller was drawn to this material. There's the renowned and massively wealthy Du Pont family, and the working class Schultz brothers. Even the way both families made their mark is different: the chemical and industrial legacy of Du Pont, and the athletic feats of the Schultzes. If he wanted to say something about legacy and heritage and the way that's shaped by social or class status, the foundation for exploring those ideas are there, but it would also mean dialing down a lot of other aspects to the story that could easily overwhelm what he's after.

[warren oates]

That's why I wonder if this film can only work as a metaphorical story rather than as reportage, partly because I don't think murder is realistically inevitable for a sane person.

I'd say yes, that the film is metaphorical, but it also works as a sort of hybrid of fiction and nonfiction -- at least in the details and the years long before the crime. This is the kind of precise imaginative docudrama that allows you a deeper way into the material than a more conventional documentary or a nonfiction book might have. It's sort of a cousin to a film like Compliance in that respect. You really come to understand how everyone must have felt to do what they did.

But I don't believe that "murder is realistically inevitable" only for insane people. Isn't that the project of pretty much the entire history of dramatic tragedy (or to take a smaller subset, true crime) -- showing us how, step by step, otherwise normal people might come to kill? Of course that's less of what Miller is doing in this film. It's not as much of a beat by beat dramatic construct he's after, where the ending is both surprising and inevitable. More of a character study, like the Van Sant films mfunk mentions, though one that's uniquely gripping in spite of its almost complete dedication to little character moments.

[hearthesilence]

Point taken, that's why I had rephrased that line so that it only applied to the specifics of this case. As fictional drama, it can be wholly believable, but without his mental illness as a factor, it would be difficult for me to see John Du Pont inevitably committing this crime.