The Rich Are Different From You and Me

Movies: Foxcatcher

"Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft, where we are hard, cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand." --F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Rich Boy"

Foxcatcher is a deeply weird, deeply uncomfortable film by Bennet Miller (Capote, Moneyball) that is based on a strange true story. Mark and Dave Schultz were brothers who both won gold medals in wrestling in the 1984 Olympics. You may or may not be surprised to learn that winning a gold medal in the Olympics does not guarantee a life of luxury. The film opens in 1987. Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum, in what's easily the most affecting role of his career--more on that later) lives in a crappy apartment, eats ramen for dinner, and makes the occasional buck giving less-than-inspiring speeches at local elementary schools. His gentle and patient brother, Dave (Mark Ruffalo), is doing a little better: he has a wife and a couple of cute kids and he coaches wrestling to make a living. Dave also seems to have a more relaxed sense of self and contentedness with his average post-Olympic life. 

Fate literally calls Mark on the phone one day. An assistant of John du Pont, member of the pornographically rich du Pont family, telephones Mark and asks that he come and visit du Pont at the family estate. A little befuddled at what this rich guy wants with him, Mark takes the trip and meets du Pont face-to-face.

John du Pont is played by Steve Carell. With an enormous, beaked false nose, hooded eyes, and age spots sprinkled all over his face, Carell is unrecognizable--and ugly as sin. Carell also speaks with a strange cadence: soft-spoken, with halting pauses in the middle of sentences where you wouldn't expect them (a little like William Shatner). This is a completely vanity-free performance by Carell, who has built his career playing both good-natured and bad-natured doofuses and dorky dads. But John du Pont is something altogether different: a creature born of such wealth that the idea that some people can't be bought simply does not compute in his silver spoon and silk sheet brain. Steve Carell is fucking terrifying as du Pont.

du Pont wants to sponsor the American wrestling team for the 1988 Seoul Olympics. He wants Mark on the team, and he also wants Dave Schultz to help coach. The reasons behind du Pont's fascination with wrestling are never fully fleshed out, but the film teases that it may partially have to do with du Pont's repressed homosexual desires (particularly during a scene where du Pont beckons Mark to a late-night "practice" session) and also in an effort to gain his mother's approval. Mom du Pont is played by Vanessa Redgrave, who captures the icy cold elegance of a woman who probably had a nanny raise her children for her. 

Whatever the reasons for du Pont's love of wrestling, Mark jumps at the chance to feel relevant again and to get paid and live on the luxurious du Pont estate while in training. However, he soon realizes that the man du Pont is really after is his brother, and this leads to extreme tensions between du Pont and Mark.

I don't need to reveal the ending of the film because you can Google "John du Pont Schultz brothers" and read all about it, but suffice it to say that the story does not end well. Foxcatcher doesn't focus on the climax of this strange tale, but the events leading up to it, which make for over two hours of the uneasy feeling that something horrible is about to happen. Trust me, this ain't a popcorn flick.

But the real draw to Foxcatcher are the amazing performances of the three leads. Mark Ruffalo offers support to Tatum and Carell, who are the real stars of this film, by standing aside to let the two other actors have the performances of their careers. Ruffalo plays one of the only relatable characters in the film: a deeply compassionate man who is able to set boundaries with du Pont where his brother cannot. 

Tatum is truly brave in this movie. An actor who is known for his muscle and good looks, Tatum plays Mark Schultz as a man who appears to be a big, muscular oaf on the outside, but emotional and needy for approval and acceptance on the inside. I was struck by how often Mark was explicitly or implicitly treated like an animal in Foxcatcher. There's a scene where he has a disagreement with du Pont, who responds by slapping him and calling him an "ungrateful ape". There's a scene where he and dozens of other wrestlers strip down to be weighed during the Olympic trials--men who are reduced to naked bodies to be examined and categorized. du Pont treats Mark like a pet. Where du Pont's mother has her beloved, world-class horses, John du Pont has Mark Schultz--a big, beautiful, pliant animal. Tatum gives an amazing performance walking the fine line between playing up that silent, obedient animal side at times and allowing the audience to see the depth of his humanity at other times.

As I mentioned above, Carell also gives the performance of his career as John du Pont. Not only does he transform himself physically, he takes on the cadence and mannerisms of a strange, rich man who has been sheltered from reality his whole life, yet who understands agonizing loneliness all the same. In one scene he reveals to Mark that he only had one friend growing up...and that it turned out his mother was paying the boy to be his friend all along. Although du Pont is presented as the villain of the movie, it's hard not to have some pity for the man who was crippled under the weight of his family's wealth. No wonder he turns to wrestling--a purely physical, "low" sport (as his mother sneeringly calls it) that is the total opposite of the refinement and elegance he has known his whole life.

I was very impressed with Foxcatcher. In addition to the excellent acting, the film just had a bizarre ambiance that was very unsettling. It takes guts to make a movie that will likely repel audiences, but Bennet Miller did it and the result is a movie that feels like a psychological horror film, but also a glimpse into the lives of the very rich that will make you feel grateful for your average, ramen-eating lifestyle.

A-

Mother Terror

Movies: The Babadook

Everyone knows that the best horror movies contain scary things that are metaphors for other scary things. Dawn of the Dead isn't about zombies--it's about mindless consumerism! Hostel isn't just gross torture porn--it's about America's fear of foreigners! Vampire movies are all about fears revolving around sex, disease, and contamination. The Shining is about alcoholism. Ginger Snaps is about menstruation and puberty. This list goes on. The mark of a great horror movie is not how many times it makes you jump out of your seat, but how thoroughly it gets under your skin. Because while ghosts and ghouls, witches and vampires, zombies and serial killers are all scary enough, the real horror is what we experience in the day-to-day. The existential dread of being conscious that someday we, and everyone we love, will be dead. The hazy knowledge of immense human cruelty--and worse, apathy--that lurks in our brains but rarely hits us with the full force of its horror. These are the real terrors. Ghosts are just child's play (although, to be fair, the movie Child's Play scares the shit out of me).

And so it is with The Babadook, a complex, layered, minimalistic Australian horror film written and directed by Jennifer Kent. The Babadook uses one of the most fraught institutions we know of to terrify the audience: motherhood. As someone who is most definitely not a mother, I can only guess how scary (and simultaneously beautiful) it must be to grow a living thing inside you, give birth to it with all the pain and blood that birth entails, and then...be terrified for its safety and well-being for the rest of your life. If the definition of courage is not the absence of fear, but to move forward in spite of it, well, to choose to be a mother is truly courageous.

In The Babadook, Amelia is a single mother to 6-year-old Samuel. Her circumstances are incredibly tragic: her husband died in a car accident while driving Amelia to the hospital to give birth. Amelia survives the accident, of course, only to have the memory of her husband's death taint the day of her son's birth so much that she can't bear to celebrate Samuel's birthday on the actual day. Samuel is a piece of work himself. On the one hand, he's full of fears and anxieties, insisting that Amelia check under his bed and read him a soothing bedtime story before he goes to sleep. On the other hand, Sam has a surprising amount of bravery. He climbs to the very top of a swing set (freaking out Amelia in the process). He builds homemade weapons to protect himself and his mother against the monsters and bogeymen he believes lurk somewhere in his house. And, devastatingly, he shoulders the burden of his mother's resentment on his small back, whether he is fully aware of it or not.

 One night, Sam finds a mysterious book, titled Mister Babadook, on his shelf. Neither he nor Amelia knows where it came from. The gruesome pop-up book introduces Mr. Babadook, a ghoulish creature in a top hat and cape that hides under children's beds. Soon after the discovery of the book, strange things begin to happen around Sam and Amelia's house. Sam blames the Babadook and is constantly terrified and unable to sleep, which means that Amelia also becomes increasingly sleep-deprived and on edge. Once Amelia begins to see the Babadook herself, the movie takes a turn into that liminal world where you don't know if ghouls are *actually* haunting the character, or if it's all in their head. But either way, Amelia becomes something of a ghoul herself: screaming at Sam, acting erratically, and seeing visions of her dead husband.

The metaphor is pretty obvious here. The Babadook is a personification of the deep well of agony and suffering that Amelia has carried around since the day of Samuel's birth. Amelia has no one to turn to because it's not safe to reveal any negative emotions about your own child. And Samuel is a handful. There's a scene where he (played by an astonishing child actor, Noah Wiseman) "sees" the Babadook and just starts screaming at the top of his lungs. Watching it, I curled into a ball and wanted to cover my ears. A child's scream is both terrifying and--annoying is too mild a word--profoundly disturbing. Just listen to that scream and you'll feel a cascade of sympathy for anyone who has ever raised a child.

There were two things that I really loved about this movie. The first is Mister Babadook himself. In an interview, director Jennifer Kent explained that she wanted to "create a myth in a domestic setting", and indeed, The Babadook goes beyond a typical ghost story into something ferocious and primal. The book featured in the movie is a work of art in itself, starting out innocuously enough, with lines about "making friends with a special one", and moving towards a terrifying conclusion: "when you see what's under the bed/you'll wish that you were dead". Just do a Google Image search for "babadook book" and you'll see what I mean. Or see the movie.

The other thing I loved about The Babadook was how deeply emotional it was without being manipulative. The story is about a mother and her son and their mutual fear of one another. But even in the depths of Amelia's despair, she clings to the love she has--in spite of the circumstances of his birth--for Samuel. And to hear Samuel's little pipsqueak voice say "I'll protect you, Mum"....my ovaries just about exploded.

Here's the thing: I'm an emotional person, just like anyone else. But I want my emotions and feelings to be authentic, both in real life and in art/entertainment. I hate movies that spoon feed you emotions. I hate manipulative movies, just like I hate emotional manipulation in real life. If you're going to make a movie about the parent-child bond, show me something real, right? Don't pretend it's all gumdrops and unicorns and toys that never break. I know parenthood isn't like that. The Babadook has the balls to say that motherhood isn't always a walk in the park. And it even goes beyond that, suggesting that motherhood, in fact, can be a nightmare at times. But although the movie takes the audience to the precipice of the terror of motherhood, it doesn't throw us over the edge. It lets us see that terror, those difficult emotions and moments, and then reels us back in and reminds us that love--love from a mother to a child and a child to a mother--really can save us.

I can't say that The Babadook scared the shit out of me. But it did almost make me cry (an extremely rare event--I almost never cry during movies). And for that, I respect the hell out of it as a unique, creative, and deeply humane piece of cinema.

Grade B

Please note, if you care, that I am switching my grading system from a 1-5 star scale to a A-F grading scale since it seems more nuanced.

Talk Nerdy to Me

Movies: The Theory of Everything

I originally began this review by referring to Dr. Stephen Hawking as a "straight up baller"...but somehow, it seemed disrespectful to do so (although given Hawking's sense of humor, he might actually appreciate it). But any way you look at it, Hawking has lived a remarkable life. Diagnosed at age 21 with a motor neuron disease similar to ALS, Hawking was told he had two years to live. Hawking was basically like "fuck that" and is still alive today at age 72. Hawking is a theoretical physicist who has won countless awards and honors for his work. He is one of the most well known scientists alive today and is also an accessible writer who is able to translate his incredible knowledge for the average reader. And he did it all while battling a disease that took away his ability to walk, move, and speak without the help of a device. Such a disease would crush the spirit of many people, but not Stephen Hawking.

But what many people don't know about Hawking is that behind this remarkable man stood a remarkable woman. The Theory of Everything is the story of Hawking's relationship with his first wife, Jane Wilde, whom he met in college and who married him despite what was essentially a death sentence when he was first diagnosed with motor neuron disease. What fascinated me about this movie is how much time it devoted to Wilde (it is, after all, based on her memoir, Traveling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen) and how sympathetic it is to Wilde's struggles to raise a family (she and Stephen had three children together) with a severely disabled spouse while also maintaining an identity of her own. Talk about "having it all"!

Wilde and Hawking were married from 1965 to 1995. Hawking was diagnosed in 1963 and had progressively less control over his own body pretty quickly. Obviously, this couldn't have been a picnic for Hawking himself, but you can also imagine the emotional and physical turmoil Wilde went through. The world of 1965 was not remotely handicap accessible, nor did it look too kindly on "unconventional" relationships, which Hawking and Wilde most surely had. To be a wife in 1965 meant raising children and deferring to your husband. But what if your husband couldn't feed himself? Or hold his own children without assistance? And Wilde had interests and passions of her own. She was a very intelligent woman who eventually got a PhD in medieval poetry. I admired how The Theory of Everything did not make Wilde out to be a saint, nor did it paint her and Hawking's marriage as all roses and champagne.

However, as a PG-13 film--and a very tasteful one at that--The Theory of Everything holds back from giving the audience the entire gritty picture of Wilde and Hawking's relationship. The issue of Hawking's ability to father children is brought up in the most innocent, PG-rated way possible. A college buddy asks Hawking if the disease affects "everything", to which Hawking replies "No, different system. Involuntary." But the film doesn't even get close to examining how a disabled person might actually have sex (for an excellent film on that very topic, please watch The Sessions, incidentally one of my most-read [and favorite] reviews!). Likewise, we see very little of Hawking's day to day struggles with things like bathing, eating, and using the bathroom. Now, I realize that your average moviegoer isn't thinking "Sure, he's a world-renowned genius and all, but what I really want to know is how Stephen Hawking deals with taking a shit." I get that. Yet seeing the intimate details of what it must be like to live in a disabled body, or be in love with/married to a disabled person...well, I feel like it would have made for a more interesting and humanistic film. But I'm not everybody.

And to be fair, we do get to see some of the odder aspects of Wilde and Hawking's relationship. Specifically, the introduction of Jonathan Jones, a local choir director who befriended Wilde and offered to help out Wilde and Hawking in an unofficial caretaker capacity and also as an additional father figure for their kids. He actually moved in with the family, which was highly unconventional (and pisses off Wilde's in-laws) to say the least.

Spoiler alert? (does it count as a spoiler if it's just someone's real life?)

Jones and Wilde got married after she and Hawking divorced in 1995. The movie plays pretty coy about whether or not they got it on before she and Hawking separated.

/end spoilers

The film has an ace in the hole in Eddie Redmayne's portrayal--no, embodiment--of Hawking. All the acting (including Felicity Jones as Wilde) is solid, but Redmayne...holy shit. He already looks like Hawking, but the actor's physical performance is amazing. I read an interview with Redmayne where he revealed that he spent so much time capturing the way Hawking is, well, contorted, in the later stages of his disease, that the muscles on one side of his face became noticeably stronger by the end of the shoot. Redmayne's performance really is the centerpiece of The Theory of Everything and totally deserves an Oscar nod.

Before I went to see this film, I read a review that referred to it as "neutered". As I point out above, the film shies away from anything too shocking or depressing about Hawking's disease and his marriage to Wilde, so I understand the criticism. But I was still very pleasantly surprised by the movie. It exceeded my expectations and made me want to learn more about Stephen Hawking. It may air on the side of gentle and romantic, rather than gritty realism, but it's a solid film that pays respect to the personal and romantic life of a man known more for his brain than anything else.

4 out of 5 stars

Oceans of Time

Movies: Interstellar

I'm going to keep this one short because, honestly, I don't feel that I have too much to add to the conversation about Interstellar. The film has been out for nearly a month and those who were champing at the bit to see it probably already have. The critical reception has been, not tepid exactly, but not hot. I find myself in agreement with the general consensus of the critics: Interstellar is a movie that aims for greatness and achieves goodness.

If anything can be said of Christopher Nolan's latest film, it is definitely ambitious. Not just visually, but intellectually and emotionally. You get the feeling that Nolan envisioned this film as his magnum opus. Perhaps that ambition is what held the movie back from true greatness. It feels overstuffed, as if Nolan and his brother, Jonathan, who wrote the movie were like "Ok, we gotta have stuff about wormholes, and the love between a father and his daughter, and a message about environmental stability, and a sarcastic robot, and a message about how love is a force that transcends time, and a giant tidal wave, and and and..." My first impression upon leaving the movie theatre was that if Nolan had held back a little bit, or maybe had a tighter focus without the lofty philosophical messages, the movie would have been better.

Visually, Interstellar is amazing. There are any number of beautifully imagined scenes, including travel through a wormhole, a stop on a planet with tidal waves a mile high (this part of the movie was probably my favorite, and was also legitimately terrifying), and a climatic scene near the end that dares to imagine what five dimensions would actually look like--if you had a God's eye view of time itself. Accompanying these scenes is Hans Zimmer's pounding organ music score which is perfect for the film. It invokes a sense of religious reverence and adds to the feeling of mankind's puniness in the face of an endless universe. As a work of art, Interstellar succeeds.

As a work of philosophy, not so much. Beyond the science of wormholes and black holes and relativity, there is a message about love and human connection. The idea is that love is more than just a feeling and that it is in fact a force of nature itself that can even transcend time. The idea is voiced first by a teary-eyed Anne Hathaway, playing an astronaut who tries to convince her fellow space travelers to use the little fuel and time they have left to travel to a planet that her lover, Edmunds, set out to explore ten years earlier. She argues that her love for Edmunds is perhaps a signal, across the universe, that they will find the resources they need on his planet. On the one hand, wow, what a beautiful message. On the other hand, barf. I don't know why I reacted so skeptically to this part of the movie. But I just couldn't buy it, and I thought that this emotional overlay--"love conquers all, including the theory of fucking relativity"--just took away from the more interesting aspects of the film.

So that's my conclusion. Interstellar is a beautiful, but overly ambitious film. I found it unfocused and confusing at times, and wish Nolan had exercised a little more restraint. I guess the worst you can say about Interstellar is that it's a movie that aims for the moon--and lands among the stars.

3.5 out of 5 stars

Bring the Noise

Movies: Whiplash

I don't know how to begin this review except to take the Lord's name in vain as a way to express how much I loved Whiplash. Goddamn, that was a great movie.

Directed by Damien Chazelle, Whiplash is a small masterpiece. Unlike the huge epics and blatant Oscar bait commonly released during this time of year, Whiplash is small, unpretentious, and comes out of nowhere to get up in your face and slap you upside the head with its intensity. Everything about it--the fresh jazz soundtrack, the quick cuts and sharp camera angles, and the ferocity of both J.K. Simmons and Miles Teller's performances--is designed to leave you breathless.

Miles Teller plays 19-year-old Andrew Neiman, a first-year at a prestigious music conservatory who dreams of being a great jazz drummer like his idol, Buddy Rich. Andrew is plucked from his lower level music class by Terrence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons) and given a shot as a drum alternate for Fletcher's elite studio band class. It becomes apparent on Andrew's first day in studio band that Fletcher is manipulative and abusive toward his students--he humiliates and insults the members of his (suspiciously all-male) class for the slightest mistake and drops and adds new members on a whim. After Fletcher spends class screaming at Andrew, slapping him in the face, and throwing a chair at his head, Andrew goes home and practices the drums until his hands bleed. So begins the emotionally abusive, practically sadomasochistic relationship between the two men: one who wants to be "one of the greats" and the other who wants to discover and, in his sick way, mentor a revolutionary musician.

There are plenty of characters in Whiplash, but they all serve as props to the central relationship between Fletcher and Andrew. This is one of the only weakness of the film. Andrew's father starts out as a solid character--taking his son to the movies, arguing that being a musical genius isn't worth it if you end up dead at 34 (as Charlie Parker did), and coming to his son's rescue when it seems that the young man might be losing it. But ultimately, Andrew's father only serves as the audience's surrogate: the voice of reason Andrew stalwartly ignores as he becomes more and more invested in meeting Fletcher's challenges.

Andrew also has a love interest who certainly could have been fleshed out as a character in her own right. Instead, she is merely a prop to reveal Andrew's youthful arrogance. He dumps her early on, implying strongly that she'll just hold him back from his destiny.

The dismissiveness with which the secondary characters are treated is mirrored in the way that Fletcher treats the other drummers in his band. Once Fletcher sees Andrew's potential, he uses the other drummers (there are three guys, including Andrew, vying for one part during a climatic scene) as a way to manipulate Andrew into performing even better. While Andrew appears single-minded in his drive to become as excellent a jazz drummer as humanly possible, Fletcher is equally focused on bringing out the talents of one special player--even if it is detrimental to the band as a whole.

Miles Teller and J.K. Simmons turn in brilliant performances. Simmons is terrifying as Fletcher, and he teeters on the brink between playing a sincerely passionate man who wants to push students beyond what they ever believed they could achieve and playing a cartoon villain. In fact, Simmons does occasionally let his inner cartoon villain come out, but he does so in such a masterful, believable way that you totally buy it. I totally bought that the young men in his studio band would put up with Fletcher's bullshit and abuse in order to have potential doors open for them down the line.

Teller, who took drum lessons in order to learn how to fake-play in this movie, captures the masculine bravado of a 19-year-old boy who is deeply talented and knows it. Andrew lives in a black and white world: it's all or nothing for him. He will either be one of the greatest musicians of his generation, or he'll be nothing.

Taken together, Simmons and Teller's performances almost blend into one. Their anger, their passion, their talent, and their disturbing willingness to use one another to accomplish their goals swirls into a fucked up teacher/student relationship like I've never seen before. And what I loved about Whiplash is Chazelle's unwillingness to come down against Fletcher's abusive teaching tactics and Teller's unhealthy single-mindedness. In fact, the end of the movie seems to suggest that Fletcher is right to push his students to their extremes and to pit students against each other in order to uncover the true talent of one particular student. The film is a blunt, stark look at what it takes to be the best. Whiplash asks "is it worth it to give up your life in service to your craft?" and it answers its own question: "for a true artist, yes."

5 out of 5 stars