Film Carew: Foxcatcher, The Theory Of Everything

FOXCATCHER

There’s a great scene early in Foxcatcher, in which Mark Ruffalo and Channing Tatum —brothers who both won Olympic wrestling gold in Los Angeles in 1984— spar, and director Bennett Miller watches on, in silence. With no words, it communicates, effortlessly, a story as old as time: the greying stag bracing himself against the frisky buck; the battle-tested old-timer and the young force-of-nature standing symbolic for succession, the passage of time, the inescapable march of mortality. The scene is evocatively shot and brilliantly edited, capturing an easy physicality that suggests that, after Miller tapped into the psychology of baseball management(!) with Moneyball, he’s gone in for something more visceral with his latest kind-of-sports-movie.

He has, but it’s rarely, again, so compelling. Instead, at its worst, Miller’s take on the world of freestyle wrestling —as seen through the unbelievable based-on-a-true-story tale of billionaire heir and wrestling enthusiast John du Pont— goes in for simple homoeroticism, stopping just short of reminding us that the Ancient Greeks wrestled sans clothes.

Du Pont used his endless reserves to bankroll a private wrestling team, a fleet of strapping young lads who lived and trained on the vast estate of his family’s Pennsylvania farms. Such peddling of lithe young horse-flesh is bound to arouse suspicion, and screenwriters E. Max Frye and Dan Futterman (the latter the author of Miller’s Capote) alight on the wafting scent of sweaty men. Du Pont is brilliantly (under)played by Steve Carell, the comic actor recede behind his high pants and prosthetic nose, going small where others might swing big. As acting choice, it’s fine, but it mirrors the screenplay’s weakest element: that of reductionism.

A billionaire schizophrenic whose obsession with wrestling went hand-in-hand with an obsession with time-travel, and who unravelled to the point of committing murder, du Pont should be the source of a rich character study. But rather than attempting to inhabit his madness, Frye and Futterman look on coldly, their screenwriten psychological short-hand turning him into, simply, a closeted-queer. Heir to a fortune and unable to please his mother —a cold English matriarch played, in a handful of evocative scenes, with icy reserve by Vanessa Redgrave— he can only find an outlet for his repressed desires by “getting low” on the mat with manly men.

Eventually, his relationship with Tatum —its weird mix of father/son; of nerdy, needy friends; of lonesome souls drawn together— grows obsessive, in a second act that defines Foxcatcher. It’s at once touching and troubled, tentative affections given an eeriness by the cruelty of the history to follow. There’s an amazing mid-stream splice that condenses an entire downward-spiral into one edit: the boy-ish Tatum, fresh off snorting his first-ever line of cocaine, suddenly, months-later, sporting frosted tips; his tragic haircut a bright beacon of self-obsession, self-delusion, and, imminent self-destruction.

Tatum bristles with a desperation —the hulking, simian way he carries his body; the glare in his eyes; the bristling, ill-expressed machismo that burns within— that both suggests his character and his career. After years of charismatic-leading-man toil, he’s clearly relishing getting his thesp on, sometimes a little too much. Ruffalo, in contrast, as the kind-touch older-brother who doles out love and wrestling acumen with a generous openness, delivers a sublime turn whose Awards Show love has been well-earnt.

Foxcatcher’s three lead performances have real heft; Australian cinematographer Greig Fraser (Killing Them Softly, Zero Dark Thirty) gives everything a greying tint, as if the whole plays out under the pall of gathering clouds; and Miller’s direction is calm and considered. Yet, even though there’s a gravity to the gathered elements, the finished film, itself, is far less weighty than its elements would suggest.

THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING

The success of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar shows that even the most popcorn-poppin’ of multiplex audiences are happy to chew on theoretical quantum physics, to contemplate wild speculative philosophies on gravity and black holes. In contrast, James Marsh’s The Theory Of Everything —the Oscar season biopic on Stephen Hawking— seems to believe that no one could possibly be interested in the actual science that has made its subject so famous. A Brief History Of Time may’ve sold over 10 million copies, but unless you’ve read it, there’s nothing in this by-the-numbers biopic that communicates its ideas.

When a young Hawking —played, in a piece of mimicry alive with verve and conviction, by Eddie Redmayne— announces on opening that Cosmology is “a religion for intelligent atheists”, the film plays into that great cliché of depicting science on screen: that it must either be a rebuke of religion, or a valentine to it. This is embodied in the film’s twin star-cross’d lovers: Redmayne, a man of science, falling for Felicity Jones, a girl of God. When they gaze at the heavens, he sees equations, she quotes Genesis. They’re the original odd-couple! Marsh’s grand closing-reel finale attempts to convince you that this love-story is on the same plane as cosmology; that, in that instant of boy-meets-girl, a big-bang occurs, spawning love and life (they’d have three children), causing a ripple of infinitesimal possibilities.

It’s a romantic finalé to a film that’s, in its preceding decades, determinedly domestic. Adapted from Jane Wilde Hawking’s memoir Travelling To Infinity: My Life With Stephen, Anthony McCarten’s script chronicles marital struggles and Dr. Hawking’s debilitating affliction with motor neuron disease; and does so less with Inspirational overtones, and in a far more quotidian fashion. Were this to stand in stark contrast to the wild ideas and far-reaching dreams of theoretical physics, there might be something here. Instead there’s not so much.