Foxcatcher

FOXCATCHER   ***1/2

Bennett Miller

2014

IDEA:  John du Pont, heir to one of the US's largest fortunes, invites Olympic wrestling champion Mark Schultz and the rest of the American team to come train on his expansive estate, where things head toward inexorable tragedy.

BLURB:  The real life story of an Olympic wrestler and his relationship with a sociopathic multimillionaire becomes the grounds for a dissection of the curdled American ethos in Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher. Though perhaps somewhat dubious in its ascribing of determinants to a person who was likely mentally ill, as well as in its construing of these true events as a broader cultural statement, Miller’s film is never so conclusive as to read as disingenuous. Instead, he takes a critical look at a truly bizarre and shocking true story and mines it for all its (possible, probable) sociological and psychological implications, leaving the dazed viewer with just enough information to try to make sense of it all. Loyalty to facts or not, what is clear is this: Foxcatcher is quietly mesmerizing, a perpetually simmering portrait of souls lost and corroded on their way to perceived greatness that doesn’t have a hair out of place. With its sensationally able cast – Steve Carell, Channing Tatum, and Mark Ruffalo, among them channeling a spectrum of distressed physical states – it puts into place a roiling fabric of power relations that point up a cultural condition predicated on exploitation, violence, and delusion. Miller and ace DP Greig Fraser train an uncompromising, almost anthropological eye on masculinity, alternately wounded and inflamed, and the milieu that sublimates aggressive impulses into capitalism and privilege. It may be lots of speculation pertaining to ultimately inscrutable events, but that it seems so unnervingly plausible testifies to Foxcatcher's bruising emotional veracity.

Whiplash

WHIPLASH   ***

Damien Chazelle

2014

IDEA:  An aspiring jazz drummer comes to a prestigious music conservatory, where he is subjected to the cruel, authoritarian mentorship of his ruthless instructor.

BLURB:  Rarely has giving blood, sweat and tears to your art been depicted as literally as in Whiplash, Damien Chazelle’s blistering, somatically exhausting portrait of unrelenting artistic pursuit. Through Sharone Meir’s dread-soaked cinematography and Tom Cross’s frenzied editing, the mastery of music becomes not only beautiful but potentially deadly, the act of drumming a visceral display of masculine violence that requires as much in the way of precision and elegance as in animal fury. In the combustible relationship between J.K. Simmons’ virulent instructor and Miles Teller’s increasingly fevered protégé, written and performed with great complexity, Chazelle finds a highly unnerving representation of the artist as sadomasochist, driving himself toward destruction while justifying internal and external abuse as necessary motivators. The dynamic is deliciously multifaceted, never settling for an easy mentor/mentee dialectic but shifting, in increasingly disturbing ways, the negotiation of power and dominance between the two and the dangerously symbiotic exchange of influences that reinforces the beliefs of both. Unfortunately, Chazelle often loses his thread of logic – the world he’s set up is rather ill-defined, both realistic and heightened, often veering into outlandishness – but any depiction of all-consuming artistic obsession that dares venture into territory this dark and provocative is one that can get away with spiraling out of control every now and then.