Telluride Film Festival
In the opening minutes of “Foxcatcher,” a quietly quotidian montage details the routine of Channing Tatum’s Mark Schultz, a wrestler living and training modestly in spite of winning gold at the 1984 Olympic Games. The sequence concludes with him stepping behind a podium to address a less than captivated audience of elementary school students, and he begins with the line, “I want to talk about America.”
This opening remark appears to be a harbinger portending a film where director Bennett Miller will talk at us about America. Ramming any sort of message down our throats, however, seems the last thing on Miller’s mind. The deliberately paced and masterfully moody “Foxcatcher” provides a trove of discussion-worthy material about the dark underbelly of the world’s most powerful nation. What Miller actually wants is to talk with us about America.
Miller works deftly within the framework of E. Max Frye and Dan Futterman’s script, which itself feels beholden to no convention or genre. They slowly parse out information on the characters of the film, providing disturbing details and abnormal actions that do not lend themselves to easy explanation. “Foxcatcher” thrives on small moments that do not seem incredibly consequential as they occur, though their cumulative effect is quite the knockout.
The film crafted by Miller is not one of conventional capital-A “Acting.” It’s performance as being, not as much doing. While the talented trifecta of Tatum, Steve Carell, and Mark Ruffalo still has plenty of events to live out, they function best as the shiniest components of a larger tonal machine. Miller expertly employs them to highlight the sinister undercurrents running beneath the eerie, brooding surface of “Foxcatcher.”
His proclivity for cutaways and long-held takes has a tendency to turn the characters into specimens, but such an approach also solicits active examination. The film’s co-leads, Tatum and Carell, each carry themselves in an unconventional, magnified manner that invites peering past their appearances. What lurks beneath are truly tormented men, each seeking a symbolic meaning system to bring them fulfillment.
Based on the trailer for Lee Daniels’ “
The Italian countryside has got to be the single most beautiful place in the world. Apologies to Amanda Seyfried, but “Letters to Juliet” is a romance (not even comedy) that doesn’t deserve to feature the gorgeous country in its background. Given the quality of the script, the disillusioned lover played by Seyfried should be traversing back alleys to find the long lost love of Claire (the graceful, ageless beauty Vanessa Redgrave).
Marshall and the Movies 
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