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(12/03/14 10:15pm)
Director Bennett Miller’s third narrative feature, Foxcatcher (2014), employs a similar formula to his previous two, Capote (2005) and Moneyball (2011), which explore a real-life story about a powerful American man attempting to innovate in his field. In this case, Bennett chooses the story of John Eleuthère du Pont, a wealthy philanthropist who arbitrarily decided to convert his family’s estate, Foxcatcher Farms, into a state-of-the-art training facility for the U.S. national wrestling team. After years of sponsoring the team, including the former Olympic gold-medalist Schultz brothers, du Pont made headlines in 1996 for murdering Dave Schultz.
Foxcatcher is a psychological true-crime drama that culminates in the chilling crime from the 1996 headlines but spends the majority of its 134 minutes on the events precipitating that murder. It is a rare bit of cinema that cares more about how it gets there than where it gets. The film is, actually, quite nice to write about because it is impossible for me to spoil it for you. Its power comes from three exceptional performances and Bennett’s eerie, understated directorial flare, reminiscent of his work on Capote, as opposed to surprise plot points and special effects.
The film opens and ends with Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum), a mumbling solitary man struggling to make ends meet in the wake of his Olympic triumph. Baggy sweats inelegantly drape his chiseled body as he eats ramen noodles alone at his kitchen table and takes speaking gigs at elementary schools for twenty dollars. He lives in the shadow of his more outgoing and equally successful older brother Dave (Mark Ruffalo), who has adjusted to post-Olympic life with grace, having settled down with a wife and kids and landed coaching gigs around the country.
Mark Schultz takes advantage of an unexpected opportunity to regain some swagger when heir-to-fortune John du Pont (Steve Carell, unrecognizable) randomly propositions him to come to his 800-acre Pennsylvania estate and become the centerpiece of a wrestling team preparing for the 1988 Seoul Olympics. John is desperate to escape the shadow of his pompous mother (Vanessa Redgrave) and make a name for himself. He is a child in an adult’s body, disconnected from the world and quick to anger when things don’t go his way. How he landed on wrestling as an avenue to assert his independence is not obvious given his unfamiliarity with the sport, though its physicality seems to relate to John’s repressed sexuality.
There are noticeable parallels between Mark and John. Each live in isolation, prisoners of their respective economic circumstances and lacking the social skills to sustain relationships. They each struggle to meet the expectations associated with their last names and form an unsettling father-son, mentor-apprentice, boss-employee relationship. It’s unsettling namely because of the gross imbalance of power between the two. John exploits Mark for cheap labor. He takes advantage of Mark’s craving for attention and turns him to cocaine and alcohol, valuing his existence only to the extent that he is able to turn in wins on the wrestling mat. Perhaps more deceitful is the way John leverages his relationship with Mark to get what he really wants: Mark’s brother Dave.
Tragically and inevitably (and tragic because of its inevitability), Mark and Dave both eventually succumb to John’s wishes — they move to the estate and train at the facilities, a move which forever indebts them to John, at least in John’s eyes. Dave is a smart, friendly, thoroughly likeable guy who shows genuine care for his younger brother and a definite skill for coaching. His presence focuses Mark and seems to balance out the harm John has caused.
But in spite of his coaching prowess, and perhaps because of it, Dave’s presence ultimately threatens Du Pont’s control over Mark. In a particularly memorable scene, Dave is helping Mark lose twelve pounds in ninety minutes (!) to make weight for a match. Through Mark’s hazy, physically exhausted eyes we see John enter the room and try to get involved in Mark’s workout. Before he gets close, though, Dave intervenes, barring John from talking to Mark. It’s a fabulous moment in which the tension between the three of men is represented in an intimate and visceral way. It also emphasizes Mark’s vulnerability as the two main familial figures in his life vie for control over him.
The relationship triangle between these men is the crux of the film and the shifting of power over Mark from Dave to John and back to Dave paves the way for the crime on which the film is based. Bennett emphasizes distance throughout, using plenty of medium and wide shots and long takes to make the cold landscape of the estate feel unsettling and isolating. We also feel distance from John himself. Not only are his motivations fuzzy as a result of his apparent mental instability, but Steve Carell’s face is heavily obfuscated under mounds of makeup and a hooked nose that will haunt your dreams. We can’t relate to this character and now we don’t even recognize the actor playing this character.
Though Bennett’s commitment to distance leads to an emotional disconnect at times, it is effective in creating a world in which the characters and viewers feel simultaneously safe and disturbed. I promise you will be disappointed if you walk into the theater expecting a ‘thriller,’ in the literal sense of the genre, as it was unfortunately marketed. The film is a slog by any standards, let alone those established by fast-paced thrillers. But its deliberate pacing is worth it if you, the viewer, aren’t in a rush to get anywhere.
(11/06/14 2:39am)
The phrase “in a world” evokes that overly dramatized Hollywood movie trailer voice. But what does that voice sound like? The voice you now hear in your head is almost certainly a deep, booming, male voice. Lake Bell’s 2013 debut feature, In a World…, in which she also stars, deals directly with gender dynamics as applied to the cutthroat, male-dominated world of movie voiceover. This snappy, tragicomic gem is the story of Carol, a vocal coach who must overcome the wishes of her voice-actor extraordinaire father (Fred Melamed) in pursuing her own dream of becoming a voiceover artist. Bell, who wrote, starred and directed, implicates each of us in the patriarchal world painted in the film. In many ways this world could substitute for real-life Hollywood by forcing us to question our association of voiceover narration with an idealized man’s voice.
For better or worse, Bell creates a just-absurd-enough filmic reality to dispel some of the would-be viewer discomfort. Ultimately the film pokes fun with a more thorough undressing of the structural social ills of the film world. Complete with a coming-of-age awkward romance - Demetri Martin is convincing as the bashful love interest of Bell - a troupe of standout supporting comedic relief, especially Nick Offerman and Tig Notaro, and a subplot involving a marital crisis, which at times seems to overwhelm the main plot, In a World… is disarming in its low-key visual style and on-point writing. Three particularly memorable moments include a bizarre, self-deprecating Eva Longoria cameo as herself, references to a disturbingly plausible exoticized Hunger-Games-esque franchise called The Amazon Games and an appearance from Geena Davis, star of Thelma and Louise, to provide a sobering dash of reality for the main character (and us) at just the right time.
In a World… is more impressive when considering how few films star and are written and directed by women, never mind the fact that Bell fills all three of those roles exceptionally well here. Bell has somehow orchestrated a film that both appeals to a mainstream audience and also effectively challenges the very imbalanced structure within which she operates. Any way you break it down, Hollywood amounts to a disturbingly patriarchal social club.
Look at earnings differentials between male and female actors. Consider that so many Hollywood films flunk the “The Bechdel Test,” which asks if a work of fiction features at least two women who talk to each other about something other that a man. Survey the demographics of Academy Award voters. A 2012 Los Angeles Times study determined Oscars voters are 77 percent male. Or do none of the above and just watch Hollywood movies and notice who’s doing the storytelling and whose story is being told. The results to any of the above evaluations are chilling, made more terrifying only by the extent to which general apathy characterizes most people’s attitudes towards the extreme gender inequality that permeates the dominant institution of the most popular form of storytelling in the United States.
I mention all of this to highlight that the many obstacles Bell must have faced in making this film are not insignificant and in many ways actually mirror the obstacles faced by her character Carol in pursuing her career as a voiceover artist. Of course, the Hollywood landscape I’ve described fails to account for the myriad of gender identities overlooked in a conversation about the male-female gender binary and also ignores important intersecting identity categories like race and class. The LA Times study mentioned above found that the Academy voters are also 94 percent white. However, this particular film focuses primarily on a woman trying to make it in a “man’s world.” Women quite literally struggle to be heard here.
So what to make of In a World…? It’s a tiny film by Hollywood standards with a budget south of $1 million that, by Hollywood standards, is thematically radical, though we know at this point that Hollywood standards are … flawed, to say the least. At the end of the day, though, the film is immensely watchable and populated by complex characters figuring out how to live in a flawed world. Sounds kind of familiar.
(10/08/14 12:42pm)
Why do we tell stories? How do we tell stories? How do the stories we tell shape our identity? These are the questions at the center of filmmaker Sarah Polley’s 2012 documentary feature, the aptly named Stories We Tell. Polley asks each of her family members (and a few family acquaintances) to tell “the whole story” of her late mother, Diane. She stitches the resulting narratives together to reveal contradictions that complicate the very nature of her family and of her place in it. Interspersed are beautiful home videos depicting everything from Polley’s parents’ honeymoon to her first swim. This footage not only diversifies the visuals of the interviews, but also makes the quality of the videos themselves striking. Shot on Super 8 film, each sepia-toned pixel is meant to evoke deep nostalgia. These images tell you that you are watching the past and that you should miss it.
We are conditioned over and over again to accept that documentaries deal in some way with “real life,” and this assumption unavoidably impacted how I watched the film. Many elements of this film do seem to reinforce its documentary label, including the interviews, home video footage and even Sarah’s father, Michael, who provides some semblance of narration. This is all familiar. But as the story unravels, a filmic self-awareness emerges that enables it to defy traditional documentary conventions.
For starters, we see the camera setups for each interview and get some candid banter between Sarah and her family before the “official” interviews begin. “Are you nervous?” she asks each of her subjects. In addition, we actually see Michael onscreen, reading his narration in a studio. At various points Polley interrupts and asks him to repeat phrases. In this way we are watching the production of something we are accustomed to accepting at face value.
And then there’s the issue of the home videos mentioned above. As the film rolls along it becomes highly suspect that Polley’s family happens to have perfect footage of all the touched upon events. It turns out that all of these “home videos” are actually reenactments, complete with actors and actresses playing younger versions of the different family members. Reenactments are nothing new to the documentary genre. However, the presentation of these scenes as authentically old, as imbued with a sort of nostalgia reserved for sacred relics of times past, causes the viewer to think about filmmaking choices that are so often meant to be invisible. All these examples of genre-bending techniques add to a ‘meta’ framework that prepares us to play an active role in considering why this story is being told in this particular way.
It becomes clear that Polley’s subjects each consider their own versions of the story to be more true than the others’. In spite of all this, the very presence of multiple truths casts doubt over each of them. So the film’s meaning actually seems to have very little to do with the content of the stories (however emotionally compelling we find them) and more to do with the storytelling process itself. Polley begs us to value multiple truths and acknowledge the subjectivity of human experience.
Stories We Tell is a beautiful portrait of the way people frame the same stories differently in order to make their own pasts, presents and futures coherent. Each character has rationalized information about Polley’s mother, realizations that surfaced many years after her death, in ways that maintain the coherence of their own stories. When Michael talks about how hard it was to lose his wife after being with her for 25 years, I can’t help wondering if he is also referring to the difficulty of dealing with the changing nature of his own truth about his wife in the face of new information.
What begins as a narrative about remembering the filmmaker’s own mother evolves into a tale about unearthing family secrets and ends up as something of a commentary about our human obsession for seeking truth. To end on a quote from one of Polley’s sisters: “I guess that to me is another misconception. That there is a state of affairs or a thing that actually happened and we have to construct what actually happened in the past … you don’t ever get to an answer.”
(09/18/14 12:59am)
The first round of class assignments and some surprisingly brisk weather have ushered in the fall semester more quickly than many of us would have liked. However, before you send a fifth email to that professor who won’t let you into their class or get geared up to find new ways to procrastinate (read: finding new ways to procrastinate is procrastinating), take a few minutes to read about my favorite movie of the summer season. **Spoiler alert** It’s not Sex Tape.
Summer 2014 was marked by blockbuster sequels (22 Jump Street, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes), epic indies (Snowpiercer, Boyhood), and a standout performance from a beloved actor gone too soon (Philip Seymour Hoffman in A Most Wanted Man). In spite of all these notable flicks, my favorite of the summer received half the buzz, in part because of its late August 22nd release, and boasts a total of three onscreen acting credits. Despite its late release and small cast, The One I Love, director Charlie McDowell’s debut feature, is a smartly stylized and consistently surprising 91 minute gem and my favorite movie of the summer.
I was drawn to the film mostly because I’ve been bingeing on Mad Men and would have been excited to watch anything with actress Elizabeth Moss’s name attached to it. The fact that it was being pegged as a romantic comedy-science fiction-mystery-drama had me even more intrigued. It’s a hard film to go into detail about without ruining the ‘twist,’ so bear with me and really just go see the damn thing (it’s streaming on Amazon and iTunes).
The film opens with Ethan (Mark Duplass) in voiceover describing “the greatest night of his life.” His story involves an impulsive first date with wife-to-be spent pool-hopping and falling in love. As we listen, we watch the couple on-screen driving at night and sneaking around the outside of a house, presumably acting out the events of the narrated story. However, the eerie visual tone, with an emphasis on emptiness and shadows that will become recurring motifs throughout, seems incongruous with the magical spontaneity of the couple’s recited origin story. It turns out the onscreen couple is acting out the narrated story - just not in the way you immediately think.
Longtime couple Ethan and Sophie (Elizabeth Moss) are actually in marriage counseling telling this story to their therapist (Ted Danson, who happens to be Director McDowell’s stepdad). We learn that the Ethan and Sophie we saw sneaking through the bushes were attempting, and failing, to recreate a moment in their relationship from long ago when they were truly happy. As if the uncomfortably long time the camera stays on the couple treading water in their reenactment isn’t enough, we get a few unnecessary lines like “it’s a little colder than I remember” in reference to the pool water, and “happy anniversary anyway,” to really hammer home just how far this relationship has fallen.
I love this opening sequence because by the time the movie title appears on screen just two minutes and eighteen seconds in, we already know everything necessary about Ethan and Sophie’s relationship. For the rest of the film you don’t learn much else. Sure, you find out that Ethan cheated on Sophie and that they once did ecstasy at Lollapalooza, but as movie-goers and human beings we are so familiar with the trajectory of this relationship that any new information we learn about it is perfunctory. The familiarity of the The One I Love’s central relationship allows the film to explore its central question more effectively: what happens to an ordinary relationship when tested under remarkable circumstances?
The tired circumstances that lead Ethan and Sophie to take their therapist’s advice and go on a retreat to a secluded vacation home elevate the impact of the surreal, Charlie Kaufman-esque plot elements that threaten to fracture their bond once on the retreat. We have seen these characters and this relationship before, just not under these circumstances.
Yet nothing is taken as a given. Moss and Duplass shine in their roles as bewildered husband and wife trying to figure out what is going on while simultaneously trying to repair their relationship. They serve as believable proxies for viewers’ own investigations of the plot. Thankfully, the film’s surreal plot-devices are only ever relevant to the extent that they allow Sophie and Ethan to develop as characters. And as far as character driven films go, screenwriter Justin Lader gives this one a great sense of forward motion. It never feels dull or circular - an accomplishment considering how many times the characters enter and exit the same sets.
At times The One I Love felt like a horror movie due to the film’s use of obstructed perspective shots and the prominence of empty spaces. Other times Moss and Duplass provide welcome comedic relief. The genre-bending film is a perfect balance of the familiar and the unknown, both from stylistic and narrative perspectives, and the product is a work that seems both emotionally authentic and technically fresh. Everything from performance down to set design seems absolutely essential to the narrative. While Boyhood was impressive in scope and ultra-relevant (especially to us college kids), no film accomplished so much with so little this past summer as did The One I Love.