ARTS & CULTURE
22 Obiter Dicta
Film reviews
» continued from page 11
comedian who gave us the dim-witted meteorologist of Anchorman, is the real shock to the system.
He delivers a commanding, compellingly creepy
portrayal of a man with dead eyes and a cold heart;
someone who’s grown up under a withering gaze,
who watches over his underlings with the predatory
gaze of an eagle, and whose effortful self-containment is second-guessed by a dangerous flicker in his
eyes. Stiff, staring, alien, and pathetically funny, he’s
a monster of American wealth; a coiled serpent in an
ill-fitting tracksuit.
These performances are beyond reproach, which
makes it even stranger that the film never quite
turns into the crushing experience it should be. Du
Pont’s meticulous, airless haven, referred to as the
“big house,” may remind you of the mansion from
Sunset Blvd. or the motel from Psycho. And as a dark
drama masquerading as a sports movie, channelling
The Wrestler and The Social Network, it’s most obvious yardstick is Raging Bull - an unfairly impossible
measure of a film’s success.
Cannes Best Director winner Bennett Miller
(Capote, Moneyball) and his screenwriters thought
through every scene, line, and minute of Foxcatcher,
which proceeds like a well-constructed argument.
The dialogue is spare, rich, and thorny, and essential
at understanding the tightly wound triangle at its
centre. Miller’s canniest achievement is his depiction
of the precariousness of bonds, and how those bonds
can shift drastically and imperceptibly. As detailed as
a dust-covered oil painting, Foxcatcher is admittedly
fascinating in its incremental layering of a bizarre
and thoroughly warped character study.
Yet its reasoned and restrained approach – never
less than careful and clever – and Greig Fraser’s centuries-old-mausoleum-inspired cinematography, not
to mention the punishingly long running time, make
for a feeling of funereal sobriety, exacerbated by the
oppressive atmosphere of fatalism as it builds to its
tragic climax. Foxcatcher reaches for big insights
about American ambition and greed and the dangers of unchecked entitlement, while simultaneously
t humbs down
Formatting the table of contents in your
summary. The worst.
ê An incredibly sad and poignant portrait of two men desperate for greatness.
treating its real-life subjects like the stars of a Greek
tragedy.
As a result, the movie falls prey to the characters’
repression. Few dramas plumb the quirky, unsettling depths of human nature like Foxcatcher, but it
proves impossible to embrace because of fundamental miscalculations in craft, set design, and makeup,
along with a certain clumsiness in which it overstates its twisted patriotism (watch for the US flags
and incessant cheering) and manipulates its sad
story into a grand statement on the supposed lack of
American values.
In sports, what Foxcatcher does is called “running out the clock.” The performances elevate the
material majestically, but can’t bring it across the
finish line. It’s basically one long, sick joke played
at half speed, maddeningly indistinct, as if the necessary details remain somehow inaccessible to us,
when a little less muting might have made it mesmerizing. Instead, Foxcatcher is a good character
study with acting so fine that it’s irksome; it’s not
in the service of a real, emotional wallop. A win has
rarely seemed more self-defeating.
Maps to the Stars (2014) 2.5/4
Virulent, dismal, crackling, and unforgiving, Maps
to the Stars is a sickly enjoyable wallow in the scandalous side of show business; a writhing, pharmaceutically heightened waking nightmare; and a
grotesque noir vivisectional in its scorn and sadism.
It’s a seething cauldron of a film.
A tour through the lives of an LA family chas