Foxcatcher takes its name from Foxcatcher Farm in Pennsylvania, owned by the Dupont family, the location of Bennett Miller’s stunning tale of masculinity at the edge, childhood deprivation, and the disastrous magnification of personal instability by untold wealth. From the outset, surface appearances tease thought. The film opens on a man in a seedy gym doing battle with a leather object of humanoid shape. Who is he? What is the meaning of his fierce and desperate determination? What is the nature of his relationship with a man who soon takes the place of the dummy? What sport is involved here? Is it a sport? Is this a sports movie?

The men in question are brothers, Mark and David Shultz, in order of appearance, and the questions inspired by this initial encounter correctly predict there will be many more generated by every encounter in the film. It doesn’t take long to discover that this is a story about Olympic wrestlers, but it is like no sports movie that has ever been made. The typical cinematic treatment of contact sports follows the linear pattern of the boxing movies of the 1930s-1950s which mandates that a champion-in-the-making triumph over some kind of pretty clear peril. Screenwriting 101. By contrast, Foxcatcher, with its slow, graceful, accumulation of the pieces of its collage, unfolds to reveal the separate, various, and never entirely clear, underlying motivations of Mark and David Shultz, and John Eleuthere Dupont, in their collective determination to bring home Olympic gold. When the final shot fades, the big picture of the events that transpire, which I will not reveal in the hope that you will come to this amazing film with fresh eyes, remains a morass of idealism, emotional disturbance, and uncontrolled love and rage.

The cast is flawless. Channing Tatum, as Mark Shultz, fills the screen with the almost unbearable vulnerability of a slow thinking, physically powerful man who will always remain the neglected child he was. Mark Ruffalo, as David Shultz, a product of the same neglect, radiates the hard won warmth and competence of a man who inexplicably retained his capacity to give and receive love despite his virtual abandonment by his parents. Magically, the two actors convey the viscerality of these wrestlers in two different keys, like a pair of musical motifs threading a complex score. But it is Steve Carell, an actor synonymous with light comedy, who turns in the performance of the year, and of his life to date, as John Dupont, the quietly twisted heir to a family fortune that is about as old as the United States itself. Dupont’s body language bespeaks a man who craves but fails to achieve a “manly” physical existence. His every appearance in the film—and he is on screen often—would be extremely funny if it weren’t so savagely threatening simply because Dupont clearly has no idea who he is underneath his platitudinous old money American optimism that if you enter a competition confidently, you will win. In many ways, he is one of the most desolate characters ever to appear onscreen.

As is evident, Foxcatcher is dominated by men, and yet the presence of Dupont’s mother, Jean (Vanessa Redgrave), and David Shultz’s wife, Nancy (Sienna Miller) are indispensable to any understanding of what is roiling beneath the surface. This is particularly true of Jean Dupont. Redgrave appears in three brief scenes and says very little in any of them, but the tenor of her powerful presence makes you feel that she is the wordless explanation, if one could only read it, of what has made her son the way he is. Similarly, somehow we come away feeling that we have witnessed not only personal histories, but the history of the United States, a bellwether for the future—unless there is something we can glean from these tormented souls that will help us to do better.

Equally pregnant with subtext is Nick Broomfield’s Tales of the Grim Sleeper, a model of ethnographic documentary, reflecting Broomfield’s training by documentarian Colin Young at the National Film School in Great Britain to be respectful when venturing onto the territory of groups wary of outsiders. Investigating the twenty-five year career of mass murderer Lonnie Franklin Jr., Broomfield was challenged to find a way to gain the trust of one of the most understandably mistrustful areas of the city. He came into South Central Los Angeles with his camera at the end of Franklin’s long rampage that the police did nothing to stop and his investigation makes clear that the department was monumentally lax because it had simply written off the black population. Ask the women of The Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Murders. The police dismissed their concerns saying in so many words that the “Grim Sleeper’s” victims were “only hookers.” (Their slang term for black-on-black crime was NHI, No Humans Involved.) Yet if the police had bothered to ask almost anyone who lived on Franklin’s street, they would have had abundant evidence to stop him in the early years of his rampage.

Broomfield found the evidence within a period of weeks. Shooting the documentary without a script, he let the facts determine the film’s structure, and as facts emerge the attitudes of the people of South Central begin to change visibly toward Broomfield’s questions. Discovering that someone actually cares about what is going on, three men who began by vigorously defending Franklin request follow-up interviews to confide highly incriminating information about him. Even more important, Broomfield gains the trust of Pam, a woman who had been an independent (pimpless) street prostitute for many years and was able to encourage the people she knew to talk candidly on camera.

The revelation of Tales of the Grim Sleeper, and its subtext, is not police malfeasance, however, but the dignity of so many invisible, all but dispossessed Americans. The dignity with which they discuss their lives and the lives of the people around them is shattering. They exhibit far less tendency to denial and self-deception than many of the fortunate, highly visible Americans we see daily on the news. As the case against Franklin becomes more and more substantial, we increasingly understand the irony and resilience with which his neighbors fight to maintain their self-respect while the legal system drags its feet. It is impossible to watch unmoved. I have heard, with disgust, some privileged Americans voice the opinion that such people are better off dead. Broomfield’s film only strengthens my belief that they have no self respect. They love only their affluence, not the human essence that is the sole point of pride of the people to whom Broomfield introduces us.

Finally, we turn to Olivier Assayas’ Clouds of Sils Maria, an incandescent portrait of aging, creativity and the complex interplay of motives among women. Did you know that there is a valley in the Swiss Alps, over which the clouds roll in the shape of a serpent every morning? This is the key image in Assayas’ film, but like everything else in it, the metaphor will not reveal itself effortlessly to you. And I won’t either. You have to work.

The story is simple. Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche), a highly intelligent actress at the peak of her career, is traveling with her assistant Valentine (Kristen Stewart—yes, THE Kristen Stewart, who, it turns out, can really act) to accept an award on behalf of the reclusive playwright who penned the play that twenty years previously made her a star. En route, she receives news of his death and soon after gets an intriguing offer.

Her breakout role long ago was as Sigrid, a conniving vixen who seduces her boss, Helena, a mature woman unsure of what approaching old age holds for her, in an “All About Eve” ploy to replace her. Maria is now asked to star in a new production of the play, but in the role of Helena. Assayas, Binoche, Stewart, and Chloe Moretz, as Jo-Ann Ellis the “wild child” Hollywood actress who will play Sigrid in the new production, brilliantly weave the threads of desire, ambition, artistry, and anxiety that intertwine in the subtext under these events.

Who, we begin to wonder, is manipulating whom, as Maria struggles to enter into the emotions of a character who is roughly in the same daunting position she faces in her own life? It seems that all the power is on the side of the young women, and that Maria is now living the victimization of Helena. But possibly not. There are indications that, all appearances to the contrary, Maria is masterfully drawing the young women into her web, in order to use them off-stage to find her on-stage character. The final twist, however, is that no matter how well she parries the competition, the implacable truth of approaching old age remains. Maria cannot escape THAT through art. This is a wondrous film that will not get nearly enough distribution, even in art houses. Catch it while you can; you’ll be missing a small masterpiece if you don’t.

Same time, next year at NYFF 2015? 

This post is part of an ongoing partnership between Antenna: Responses to Media & Culture and the Society for Cinema & Media
Studies’ Cinema Journal.

Red Army, one of the festival surprises, is an exhilarating chronicle of the vicissitudes of the championship Russian team that ruled hockey in the 1980’s. The film examines the period in which the Soviet Union was moving through Perestroika toward collapse, and huge salaries offered by the NHL were enticing Russian ice heroes to move to the United States. It is a lens on international relations between Capitalist and Communist countries, and even more intensely an examination of two philosophies of sport. The lower paid Russians take a team approach to hockey that renders play an art, through which individuals evolve intricate strategies that martial the energies of cooperative endeavor. The mega bucks Americans take a simple, brute every-man-for-himself approach. The comparison highlights a barbarity in the individualistically motivated U. S. players.

Ironically, however, Vyacheslav “Slava” Fetisov, the captain of the Russian team, and central figure in Polsky’s documentary, emerges as the protagonist in the festival films closest to the standard American hero, a “John Wayne” prototype, just warmer and more effusive. Wayne played heroes who were the best at what they did, wouldn’t begin a fight, and if dragged into combat made damn sure to finish the conflict their way. Cut off that bolt of cloth, Slava is a tough individualist who refuses to let the Soviet bureaucracy push him around. Going the Wayne prototype one better, Slava balances his dashing self-confidence and brilliance on the ice with a deep loyalty to his fellow players. So he faced a crisis when the NHL came calling, and the Russian powers-that-be broke numerous promises that he would be released from his commitments to play in America. While his teammates kowtowed to the politicos, Slava quit the team rather than be betrayed one more time. And he got his way. Freedom! America! But not the happy ending he envisioned. Once in the United States, Slava’s dedication to the art of group strategies was tested severely. I will leave it to you to discover his American ordeals for yourself when you see Red Army, which you should not miss, and not just because at the press conference Slava reduced a room full of unsentimental film critics to abject admiration.

The later years of the painter J. M. W. Turner, the protagonist of Mike Leigh’s latest film, is another kettle of fish, but equally tasty and unusual. Played by Timothy Spall, in an Oscar caliber performance, Turner is a waddling, grunting, heavy breathing warthog. His physical aspect defies every expectation Western audiences have of their heroes. Not only is he extremely ugly—Spall underwent a profound transformation through the magic of makeup—but his sexual habits and personal hygiene will disgust many moviegoers. Yet Turner emerges in this plotless, peripatetic rendering of the artist’s travels around the seaside at Margate, and in London as a figure with an appealing passion for life and a fidelity to his inner lights. Cinematographer Dick Pope has done an eye-popping job of using the palate of Turner’s colors and his lighting in rendering the tones and textures of the film. Leigh’s depiction of what Turner was as a man and an artist thrillingly blasts every stereotype of masculinity and aesthetics with which we are acquainted.

Finally there is Julien Gahyde (Mathieu Amalric), the protagonist of The Blue Room, directed by Mathieu Amalric. Based on a Georges Simenon mystery about an ordinary man accused of murdering his wife, The Blue Room, at first seems slight. But at his press conference, Amalric helped me to deal with my sense that there was something I wasn’t getting, when he explored with us what he had in mind. We are so used to cinematic and televisual depictions of the bravado, or cunning, or stupidity of the accused murderer that it takes a while to adjust to Amalric’s stunningly atypical depiction of poor, ordinary Gahyde’s psychological paralysis when he becomes the main suspect and finds it impossible to speak on his own behalf. We are given little to confirm whether or not he is guilty, which abandons us to his silence and throws us into his state of confusion. He cannot conceive of himself as a murderer, and yet he is presented with evidence that he must have done the deed. Ultimately, although the court reaches a clear-cut verdict, there is no certainty in the film about what happened. Amalric has brilliantly captured how tenuous our grasp is on our understanding of what we do, let alone the people we are called upon to judge.

The achievements of Polsky, Leigh, and Amalric appear even more impressive when contrasted with the putatively “different” masculinities in two other festival offerings, Gone Girl (Dir. David Fincher) and Eden (Dir. Mia Hansen-Love) which concern, Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) and Paul (Felix de Givry), respectively. Nick and Paul are part of a growing group of feckless males who stand at the center of movies that depend on the sensational energies of a tormentor to hold the audience in their seats, without shedding any light on either limp protagonist, or spectacular adversary. Some will find this harsh and overly dismissive, and to them I apologize. But Paul’s inability to grow to maturity in the drugged-out 1990’s French electronic music scene that acts as his antagonist and Nick’s victimization by his wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike), a black widow disguised as a pile of vanilla goo, can’t hold a candle to even one close-up of Julien’s face, or one talking head sequence with Slava, let alone Turner spitting on his canvas as he paints.

Look for Part Four next week.

This post is part of an ongoing partnership between Antenna: Responses to Media & Culture and the Society for Cinema & Media Studies’ Cinema Journal.

All we see are the banal performances that constitute everyday life. The characters, three couples “of a certain age,” regard the play in rehearsal as theatre. But Resnais clearly indicates that it is their lives that are the playacting. He depicts their homes as facades composed of stage flats. Alternately, between dramatized scenes, we see charming drawings of their houses, of the type that might decorate children’s storybooks. There are no doorways, only slit canvas sheets through which the characters make their entrances and exits. All the immediacy and sex remains “off-stage” with Riley. Resnais, who began depicting skin on skin sex scenes in Hiroshima Mon Amour, finishes up with a sense that the only honest representation of sex is one that confesses that the delights of sensual energy are unrepresentable. Riley escapes him—and his audience.

Life of Riley is a charming film. Its characters are mannered but still appealing, filled with the pathos and resignation of maturity, buoyant with the light gallic touch of Max Ophuls’ La Ronde (1950), that fearlessly regards romance and sex as deliciously ineffable. But where Ophuls coyly avoids explicit representation as a matter of aesthetic tact, Resnais actively questions the credibility of direct pictorial confrontation of the passions. This, in stark contrast to the revulsion-filled sexual directness of David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars and Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini. They suggest that the demise of the Production Code has not resulted in an evolved American depiction of sex, but rather a more graphic exhibition of America’s anxieties about the body.

Cronenberg’s Maps is a savage, fully realized portrait of what has become of love and sexuality under the reign of an American culture industry that eats its young, and puts maturity out with the trash. It is not so much a “Hollywood expose,” as the use of the narcissistic showiness of Hollywood as a metaphor for a contemporary American self-involvement so complete that the pleasure and fertility of sexuality has withered into a pervasive culture of incest, a sterile turning inward of the energies that have, time out of mind, stood for outgoing connectivity and faith in the future. Cronenberg explicitly displays for us all manner of sexual acts and nakedness, all suffused with disgust and anxiety. Central to Maps is the Weiss family, harshly cut from the ancient Greek marble of tragic drama, on an inevitable downward spiral because of an inadvertent Sophoclean sexual transgression of family ties.

Or is it inadvertent? Maybe at first. However, enlightenment doesn’t come in the final act, as in Oedipus, but rather lurks in the backstory, in which knowledge of incest was consciously suppressed to facilitate a frantic struggle for fame and fortune, an acid obsession that dissolves all other concerns. As vicious as the Weiss family story may be, however, with its ruined mansion just below the “HOLLYWOOD” sign, and its stunning modern, subsequently built family abode, in the end it displays more nobility than the stories of the other Hollywood characters, particularly the subplot of which Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore), a star noted for both talent and glamour, is the center. Where the Weisses suffer the consequences of their sins against their own humanity, Havana successfully wallows in the possible incest she may have experienced as a child, and hypocritically embraces mystical fixes to her discontents. Havana resembles nothing so much as a New Age rabid hyena.

Maps is one of the darkest comic films America has yet produced. Yes, comic. The audience at the press screening was often convulsed with laughter at topical references and vicious absurdities. This includes some black humor when, during a visit to the set of a Star Trek-like movie, the scarred face of Agatha (Mia Wasikowska), the 16 year old daughter of the Weiss clan, is mistaken by one of the Assistant Directors for an inadequate alien make-up job. “Get some color on that,” he yells at her, “We’re filming in a half an hour.”

Ferrara’s Pasolini, a cultivated and beautifully shot and edited film about the last days of the eponymous Italian director, has a different but equally fearful take on its explicitly depicted man-on-man sex. In Ferrara’s film, Pier Paulo Pasolini’s gay sexuality is nothing but an undramatic and very small part of a life of a personally sober, if highly imaginative family man, who is primarily concerned with art and philosophy. But Pasolini’s gentle cosmopolitanism is no shield from the undercurrent of sexual hysteria around him. Willem Dafoe’s magisterial performance of Pasolini seems, for most of the film, to be asexual; only in the last sequences does Pasolini search for a “rent boy,” whom he treats with impersonal generosity, an afterthought to a busy and productive day. But, as Pasolini inaugurates sex with the boy on a beach outside Rome, a trio of thugs reduces Pasolini to nothing more than his intended (consensual) copulation through a fatal homophobic attack, the darkness of night standing for the murk of cultural ignorance. True this is Italy, not an isolated road in Utah, but it is an American eye recording the eruption of anonymous violence, once sex is made visible.

One of the gifts of a film festival of the magnitude of NYFF is the availability in the aggregate of many offerings of a rich context for any individual film; in this case the context highlights a tortured American confusion about our physical natures.

Look for Part Three soon. 

This post is part of an ongoing partnership between Antenna: Responses to Media & Culture and the Society for Cinema & Media
Studies’ Cinema Journal.

This post is part of an ongoing partnership between Antenna: Responses to Media & Culture and the Society for Cinema & Media Studies’ Cinema Journal. 

A breath of fresh air is blowing through the 52nd New York Film Festival. Often the early films are the least interesting offerings of the festival, leaving the press waiting for what is to come. This year a number of the initial screenings have left me wondering whether they can conceivably get any better.

On the second day of the press screenings, we were treated to Jean-Luc Godard’s new film, Goodbye to Language, 70 minutes. It is thrilling, and arguably at least as much of an indication of the future of film as Breathless was in its day. 84 year-old Godard is still kicking like a colt, using 3D now to continue his tradition of cinema without normative plot and characters, with the exception of a dog of indeterminate breed, who might be considered, by some, the film’s star. By means of a sequence of images and aural cues that are both linear and non-linear by turns, Godard explores many motifs in his short film: the oppressiveness of political authorities, books, movies, music, and the absurdity of human endeavor. Interspersed with a parade of people, some of whom become familiar to us, but none of whom we ever know, and certainly none of whom have any sustained goal or dramatic action, are images of the above mentioned dog moving through a forest, or around and in a lake. The people mill around in urban locations often blocked by gates that resemble prison bars, and they are sometimes suddenly and pointlessly seized by men in suits carrying guns, most of whom are rendered helpless by resistance of any kind. Sometimes, the characters talk philosophy in toilets while defecation is taking place, punctuated by appropriate sound effects.

Part of the intelligence of the film is conveyed through the juxtaposition of people and dog, but most of it is in the visual and sound design. Sounds rush at the audience at unexpected moments and Godard’s 3D creates evocative multiple physical planes, much as deep focus did for Jean Renoir in his masterpiece, The Rules of the Game. Except 3D technology permits Godard to articulate these levels with even greater force as he presents us with events taking place simultaneously on numerous layers of foreground, middle ground, and background. As a result, life and technology happen on many levels at the same time, creating a 360 degree impression of the modern world. The specific sequences are impossible to remember after one screening, and, of course, DVD will not be an option for many people as few of us have 3D players at home. Multiple trips to theatres will be necessary.

But what one takes away from Godard’s darkly comic tone and 3D-heightened sensibility, even after one screening, are questions about what can be known of the outside world by any individual–or dog. (The film is inclined to believe that the dog is most aware.) For example, when at the end the dog sits in repose, a human voice absurdly wonders whether he is depressed or thinking of the Seychelles. To drive home the point that he is unknowable in human terms, the dog appears to leave the film, walking into the woods, but suddenly comes bounding back. We comprehend nothing of his actions, but many may feel comforted by his being, as we are not by the presence of people. Move over Schrödinger’s cat.

Godard’s latest cinematic triumph makes one wonder what Hitchcock could have done with 3D if he had stopped throwing things at the audience through this technology in Dial M for Murder, but rather had played with deep space as Godard does. Imagine the scene in Notorious if he had used 3D instead of an extreme close-up to call attention to the poisoned cup of espresso Alicia (Ingrid Bergman) drinks from. And the mind boggles at the thought of what Welles might have done using 3D instead of deep focus.

Hong Sang Soo’s Hill of Freedom, a third day offering, also has its charms and its revolutionary aspects. In this 66-minute romantic comedy based on quantum mechanics, Mori, a Japanese man visiting Korea to find his lost love, reads a book called Time, about how we have invented a normative image of space and events in time that doesn’t exist. We know nothing further about the book, but the structure of the plot demonstrates its thesis. The film opens on Mori’s lost love picking up a packet of letters he has mailed in one envelope. She is not well, stumbles on the stairs and drops the undated letters, which she then can only read in random order. As she does, Hong brings to life Mori’s epistolary narration of his adventures in Korea with charming, funny people before our eyes, and perhaps finally his reunion with her. The characters shuttle between a cafe called Hill of Freedom, and the guest house in which Mori is staying. We know where we are, but not when. And without a strongly defined time line we ultimately don’t know if we are choosing to believe that we have seen a happy ending, or whether that desired ending was only a dream. Hong’s film is provocative, human, and delightfully entertaining.

Finally, there is Misunderstood, 103 minutes, the first film on our press schedule, directed by Asia Argento, daughter of famous horror film director Dario Argento, about Aria (Giulia Salerno), the nine year old daughter of a famous (fictional) movie star. In this stunning, funny, and heart wrenching film of her boom and bust life under the uncaring stewardship of two thoroughly narcissistic parents, its principal child actress, probably eleven years old, astonishingly imbues the film with an innocent gravitas as its central character. Beyond the obvious suggestions here of Argento’s biography–Asia/Aria, whose father acts in horror films—Misunderstood rises above family narrative as an indictment of a materialistic age shot through with a devastating form of spontaneity, wallowing in immediate desire, and absolutely lacking maturity. Calling Godard’s dog.

Stay tuned for part two of this series.