NEWS

Bennett Miller's sports movie Foxcatcher – based on a grisly true story – is a  tragicomedy of the beta-male, starring Steve Carell, Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo. Set for release on November 14, it competed for the Palme D’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where Miller won the Best Director Award. Telling of the also-ran and almost-ran, it is a deeply strange story about a strange man whose insecurities were all too ordinary and explicable.

Despite its hefty 134-minute running time, Foxcatcher doesn’t have an ounce of the proverbial narrative fat: If the screenplay, by Dan Futterman (“Capote”) and E. Max Frye, is relatively spare in terms of dialogue, it’s satisfyingly rich and thorny in its conception of the tightly wound triangle at its centre, while Miller’s direction evinces the same sustained intensity and consummate control of his material that defined his first two features. Crucially, this meticulously researched picture feels as authentic in its understanding of character as it does in its unvarnished re-creation of the world of Olympic sports in the late ’80s; rarely onscreen has the art of wrestling, centred around the violent yet intimate spectacle of men’s bodies in furious collision, provided such a transfixing metaphor for the emotional undercurrents raging beneath the surface.

Just as in his previous film, Moneyball (2011), Miller reveals a connoisseur's eye for the arenas and corporate spaces of sport: the training rooms, gyms, pennants, the offices – all the exciting outward show of sports prestige. Miller has a lovely scene when DuPont shows Mark the sumptuously appointed new training area he has set up at Foxcatcher, and with boyish excitement, Mark can't help going into some moves, trying it out.

Anchored by exceptional performances from Channing Tatum, Mark Ruffalo and an almost unrecognizable Steve Carell, Foxcatcher’srelease should land with major impact among serious-minded moviegoers, as well as a possible cross-section of Tatum and Carell fans who don’t mind a dramatic change of pace.

Sources: Variety, The Guardian

Image: Sony Pictures Classics

By: J. Kinnen