Foxcatcher

Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum) may be an Olympic wrestler, Gold Medalist in 1984 at Los Angeles, but he is also crippingly anti-social and an amateur athlete (read: poor). So after practice one day he returns to his sludgy apartment and chows down on Ramen Noodles at his shabby dining room table while looking at his wall, adorned, so to speak, with a framed dime-store re-creation of Leutze's immortal "Washington Crossing the Delaware", a staring contest between a detatched athlete and the grand myth of the country he supposedly represents. It is an exquisite micrososm of "Foxcatcher", the fact-based story of an eccentric billionaire, John du Pont, and his strange, strained relationship with two wrestlers over a decade. It works best as an unsettling look into the male psyche, but director Bennett Miller also tries to turn it into an overarching commentary on America.

Ostensibly "Foxcatcher" is a sports movie but all the rah-rah, sis-boom-bah typically associated with the genre has been noticeably siphoned out. Instead its tone and atmosphere feels like that room in your parents' house with the really expensive furniture and fireplace that was off limits for you and your rowdy friends, and even if you don't know the extensive details of the true-life tale, it is easy to detect that tragedy awaits rather than triumph. The wrestling, in fact, could have been anything, and the film slyly suggests that it was, seeing as how du Pont spends as much money on army tanks as he does on singlets. It's an ancient idea but a no less true one - that is, a millionaire x infinity filling the colossal void of his otherwise privileged existence with all the money that privilege can buy. He has no friends so he simply enlists some in the form of elite athletes, luring Mark to his sprawling Pennsylvania estate called Foxcatcher Farms where he has erected a regal wrestling facility from his holy shit! fortune of gunpowder and chemicals. There Mark can train in style, and du Pont can glom onto his "tutor".

Steve Carrell assumes the part of du Pont by fashioning his hook with archetypal Academy bait in the form of a significant nose job, a hunched back, schluffy gait and a creepy accent suggesting a man who spends most of his time cooped up inside his own head. It is, by all accounts, a fine embodiment of du Pont, yet it can't help but evoke perhaps Carrell's most infamous creation - office manager Michael Scott. This isn't to say that bits of Carrell's Michael Scott repertoire seep into the performance, not at all, but that his presence in each role allows their similarities to stand out. Both men are oblivious egotists, frightened of women, friendless, seemingly beholden to a severe case of Oedipus Complex. A sequence in which du Pont pathetically poses as a legit wrestling coach in front of his unimpressed, wheelchair bound mother (Vanessa Redgrave) is no more squeamish than Michael Scott trying to break dance on a booze cruise to display "leadership".

Tatum equals Carrell's turn with a just-as-intense performance, though less dependent on physical forgery. He convincingly cultivates an ultra-muscled gait and authenticates an inward drive, the perfect pent-up hull to which an affluent barnacle like du Pont can attach himself. Off the mat he is marooned by isolation, succintly summarized in a quick sequence where he sits by himself in his car, shoveling fast food into his mouth. The Loneliness of the Olympic Wrestler. It's a second-and-a-half that will break your heart. And these issues are only compounded around his brother, Dave (Mark Ruffalo), a fellow '84 Gold Medalist.

Dave, in fact, emerges as "Foxcatcher's" most critical and compelling character, undergoing the most significant change despite being more rock solid in who he is than the static principal duo. He is a devout competitor but also a genial family man with two kids and a loving wife (Sienna Miller, the most beautiful woman in the world vanishing into a Dollar Store wardrobe). He refuses overtures to re-locate to Foxcatcher Farms at his brother's behest because he refuses to uproot his family. Until, of course, the price that du Pont pitches is right because even good samaritans need to buy groceries. The scenes in which Dave is made to bow to du Pont despite du Pont's glaring vainglory and wealth-protected ignorance are nauseating, and Ruffalo plays this reluctance for all its worth.

To be certain, what we are shown is not the whole story. Psychiatric issues and more led to du Pont's downfall, topics the film does not really broach, and his relationship to Dave must have amounted to more because otherwise why would he stay? Even money isn't enough to keep a well-reasoned man around a gun-toting loony tune. Miller is not fudging the facts, however, he's merely leaving out pertinent information to sculpt his story the way he wants, painting a morality play with Foxcatcher Farms as the mammoth canvas. Dave stands in for Apple Pie & Chevy Truck America while du Point represents Wine Cellar and Goldman Sachs America, and Mark is the America that got lost off track somewhere in the middle.

That allegory gets pushed too hard, but that doesn't mean "Foxcatcher" fails to work. As an intimate, immediate, intense, and ultimately ill-fated tale of the three men, it is occasionally extraordinary. And when du Pont earnestly tells Mark that his friends call him "Eagle - or Golden Eagle", everything we need to know about America ceding its land of liberty to filthy rich imbeciles is on the screen.

Begin Again

There is a scene in "Begin Again" in which an unknown British singer/songwriter, Greta (Keira Knightley) is being wooed to make an album by a down-to-his-dying-embers record producer, Dan (Mark Ruffalo), and he exclaims that with just a few tweaks to her sound and some fine-tuning of her look she'll go straight to the top. And that's the actual phrase he employs! "Straight to the top." And I thought, do record producers still talk like that? Did they ever talk like that? Why he even keeps employing the word "babe" as a descriptive noun. It is hokeyness of the highest order and I mean this as a compliment.

On Vulture, rock critic Jody Rosen recently wrote about Schlock Music, describing it thusly: "Schlock is extravagant, grandiose, sentimental, with an unshakable faith in the crudest melodrama, the biggest statements, the most timeworn tropes and most overwrought gestures." He may as well have been summarizing "Begin Again", a schlock movie for people who enjoy "Two Princes" as much as "Queen Jane Approximately".

Writer/Director John Carney's previous feature film was the the kitchen sink rock 'n' roll musical "Once", a teensy-tiny indie that miraculously found a devoted audience and, in turn, success it could have never predicted. His long-gestating follow-up inevitably subscribes to the rules of sequelism, even though it's not technically a sequel, bigger budget and bigger stars (Adam Levine and Cee Lo both appear leaving us but one Xtina karaoke scene short of the fabled "Voice" Trifecta) and bigger ideas. Therefore, "Begin Again's" arguing in favor of spirited individualism in a modern music industry based on saleability rings disingenuous, a film curiously unaware of the commercial means by which it's peddling its anti-commercial message. Yet this thematic failure fails to negate the final product because the film also knows that while consumers may be researched and marketed to ad nauseam, they are still, as the cliché goes, humans with two ears and a heart.

It is very consciously a film for the iTunes age, wherein artists merely need a few instruments and a laptop and they can cut a record and ignore the studio as middleman and release it themselves and rely on word of mouth (read: Twitter) to build an audience. So when Dan gets Greta in his corner, he convinces her, partly out of financial desperation, partly out of his soul-gazing, that they record not in a studio but across the romantic expanse of New York. The sounds of her singing and backing band will mingle with the noises of the city to generate a naturalistically colorful collection of songs.

One fairly significant issue of the film is the music itself. Whereas "Once" was built upon the foundation of Glen Hansard (of The Frames) and Marketa Irglova's marvelous songwriting, "Begin Again" relies primarily on Gregg Alexander of The New Radicals and, well, that's the thing with music, isn't it? It's dancing about architecture, as they say, and what hits you, hits you, and might not hit someone else. And the music of "Begin Again", despite being dutifully performed, simply does not hit me. And yet. The film still ably embodies the idea of what happens when a person is hit by music in that way. I didn't need to love the music to understand what the music was doing to its characters.

The film opens in the present at an out of the way New York club for singer/songwriters, sort of a Gaslight For Hipsters, where we see Greta take the stage and a croon a ditty to a wholly indifferent crowd.....save for one patron. Dan, of course, who in the space of that solo performance envisions how it might be brought to life with a full band, a wondrous moment capturing the almost un-earthly pull of live music. And then the film flashes back in two directions to show us what brought these two sonic acolytes to this fork in the road.

Greta has come to America with her boyfriend and music-making partner Dave Kohl (Levine) only to find herself getting left behind as the label to which he is signed gently nudges her out of the picture while simultaneously glossing up his sound and image for maximum commercial appeal. He admits he's been cheating on her and Greta walks. Dan was once an uber-successful co-founder of his own independent record label but now finds himself a drunken wreck, on the outs with his daughter and wife, and tossed away from the studio he helped found when he quarrels with his partner (Mos Def) over its artistic direction.

These relationships feel surface level, under-sketched and over-reliant on tropes, like Dan's alcoholism, less a problem than a "problem", magically resolved when near the end he picks up a can of Pepsi (another symptom of sequelism - product placement - although at least he remarks on its awful taste). Once Greta plugs in, meanwhile, it's all peaches and cream, a serendipitously easy road to success, absent of real setbacks and conflicts (her brief reunion with her ex is the falsest of fake climaxes).

The film's original title was "Can A Song Save Your Life?", likely changed because that doesn't fit on a poster and even if the film is about do-it-yourself marketing, the film itself still has to get marketed and marketers don't like a wordage cluster. Even so, the question the original epithet poses remains, and "Begin Again" definitely answers it. As in, yes. A song can save your life. Which is an argument so unbelievably earnest that it will likely cause many appraisers of its quality to recoil since, as Jody Rosen writes, "We recoil from schlock even as we lust for it, because it hits us where it counts, revealing us at our most wretchedly vulnerable and human."

For all its purporting to comment on the record industry it has far less to do with the truth of what it takes to both make music and get it released than what it emotionally engenders. In other words, "Begin Again" hits us where it counts.

5 Actors Who Should Be In Everything

I was listening to the most recent episode of Ryan McNeil’s superb Matineecast and while there was much enjoyment and much information to be gleaned within its hour-plus, one sort of offhand remark, as is so often the case, struck my fancy. In discussing the Steve Carrell-starring magician opus “The Incredible Burt Wonderstone”, Ryan made mention of co-star Alan Arkin and remarked that Arkin should be in everything.

That, as it had to, totally got me to thinking: what actors/actresses should be in everything? Today I crack the case.

5 Actors Who Should Be In Everything

Bruce McGill. Most recently glimpsed as Edwin Stanton, “Lincoln’s” Secretary of War, McGill has been acting since the year I was born. Mostly (always?) seen in supporting parts, he is not so much a chameleon as a utility man, willing to lend wherever and do whatever is necessary to make a finished film crackle. I don't necessarily go into a movie thinking "Gee, I hope Bruce McGill is in this" but every time I leave a movie featuring Bruce McGill I think "Why isn't he in everything?"

Mark Ruffalo. You know how back in your party-going days (apologies to those still in their party-going days) there was always that one dude who was at EVERY party? Like, even if you saw him, said goodbye, left the party and cut across town to this other party, he would somehow have already materialized at this other party? Mark Ruffalo is that guy but for actors. If you bought a ticket for a heavy-handed drama but then theater jumped the rest of the day and saw a rom com and an action adventure on the high seas of yore, he would somehow be in all three movies. Make that, he should be in all three movies, because he should be in everything.

Hope Davis. Adept, beautiful, charming and quirkily charismatic, it makes absolutely no sense to me why Hope Davis is not a Star's Star (which, of course, is precisely why it makes complete sense to me). If I ran Hollywood, Hope Davis would be Julia Roberts. And I would decree that Hope Davis should be in everything.

Kevin Corrigan. I confess I am possibly blurring the line between Actors Who Should Be In Everything and Actors I’m Always Happy To See. But then doesn't every film need that ne'er-do-well miscreant lurking in the shadows and off to the side? Or, at the very least, a shady copier repairman or a Proust-loving garbageman or an off-kilter bartender or the unemployed dude just sitting on the stoop? Of course it does. And that's why Kevin Corrigan should be in everything.

Marisa Tomei. Plain and simple and without discussion, Marisa Tomei should be in everything. No, no, no. You clearly don’t understand. Marisa Tomei should be in E.V.E.R.Y.T.H.I.N.G.

My work here is done.