For the week of March 3rd, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is bringing Foxcatcher to Blu-ray. This drama takes inspiration from the bizarre true-crime story of John du Pont (Steve Carell), heir to the Du Pont legacy and one of the most notorious public figures of recent years; as depicted in the film, du Pont thought he could make the best use out of his family's fortune through helping to foster America's wrestling talents, an impulse that put him in the orbit of Olympics champions Mark and Dave Schultz (Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo, respectively). Yet this unlikely partnership did not yield further Olympic gold, as Mark's insecurities clashed violently with du Pont's own deteriorating psychological and emotional states. What eventually transpired was even more bizarre and disturbing than any fiction a Hollywood screenwriter could concoct, and at its finest moments, Foxcatcher maintains a perverse fascination. Once Mark decides to move in with du Pont at his Foxcatcher estate, the film grows unbearably claustrophobic, with DP Greig Fraser and composers Rob Simonsen and West Dylan Thordson working all sorts of visual and aural tricks to trap Mark in an inky, remote hell of du Pont's own making. Curiously, though, Foxcatcher never maintains any sort of morbid hold over us. Despite the story's lurid details, the film always stays distant, and I'd attribute that remove almost entirely to director Bennett Miller. In movies like Capote and Moneyball, Miller's pulled the same trick - burying anything that might give off a salacious or exciting charge under exactingly controlled objectivity - and while I respect his continuing mission to champion restraint over genre conventions, in each instance he's gone too far (a friend even asked me after seeing Foxcatcher, "Is there a WASPier director alive than Bennett Miller?"). There is such a thing as too tasteful, and Foxcatcher has so little heat you keep wanting to check its pulse. Every time it looks like the film might plumb some uncomfortable darkness, Miller pulls back, and with the exception of the understated conclusion (the one moment where the banality of tone takes on a sick-tragic dimension), we never connect with the drama, and the end result is that the yeoman's work of the cast doesn't get the extra push it deserves. Ruffalo is an oasis of calm and sanity when things get twisted (his good humor is the best thing about Foxcatcher, particularly a scene where he has to force himself to call du Pont a mentor), and Tatum gives what would be, in any other film, a revelatory performance. For all his bulk, Tatum's never looked so vulnerable on camera - he's like an overgrown child, unsure of his physicality and dependent on du Pont's beyond-unreliable care. Only Carell seems out of place, but maybe it's because his vampiric, halting du Pont (the makeup he wears makes him seem like an uneasy cross between Michael Scott and Nosferatu) is a too-broad characterization in Miller's ultra-sterile world. I dream of what David Fincher might have done with this same material.
Martin Liebman had a far more favorable impression of the film, writing that, "Foxcatcher sounds superficially simple and its cast roster doesn't exactly hint at complex drama. Anyone unfamiliar with the story of John du Pont could understandably be led to believe that Foxcatcher is something that it isn't. One thing that it is, however, and in more ways than one, is a revelation. It's not a revelation concerning the core story - that's out there for anyone with Google and fingertips - but rather a revelation of the film medium as art and a revelation in the power of complex performances, and performances coming from surprising places at that. The film is beautifully crafted in an understated and straightforward manner that is in many ways reminiscent of Miller's Moneyball but here taken to the next level. It's simple and sublime, a masterwork that commands the screen and demonstrates the power of straightforward cinema in which the story and the actors, not the camera and editing (as strong as they may be), drive the picture. The filmmakers understand and embrace the power of the lingering shot, of the camera positioned not only at the performers but at just the right place to suggest emotional, not only physical, intimacy or distance and allow the performers' nuanced mechanics to shape the story. Foxcatcher's technical details are precise and powerful, a treat for audiences appreciative not so much of creativity but the pure mechanics of moviemaking in which the technical practically vanishes in front of the eyes, leaving the screen as a detailed and evolving stage on which the story develops on its own terms and timeframe."
From Warner Home Entertainment comes the Musicals: Four-Movie Collection. With the exception of Singin' in the Rain, all the films in this set are making their Blu-ray debut: that's firsts for The Band Wagon, Calamity Jane, and the Taming of the Shrew update Kiss Me Kate. If Calamity Jane and Kiss Me Kate are fun but inessential, then The Band Wagon is, along with Singin' in the Rain, the masterpiece of the set. Director Vincente Minnelli tells the story of faded movie star Tony Hunter (Fred Astaire) and his last-ditch attempt at mounting a career resuscitation through a part in a Broadway show, and if you've never seen a Minnelli musical before, you're in for a treat. In films like this and his 1944 classic Meet Me In St. Louis, Minnelli paints in bold Technicolors and vivid camera moves, dollying and swooping and panning through a host of complex dance choreography without ever sacrificing the natural grace of performers like Astaire and his leading lady Cyd Charisse. There's such electricity to the frame here - you watch The Band Wagon, and you can sense a clear through-line from Minnelli's impressionistic abstractions to Martin Scorsese's hyper-subjective camera lens (Scorsese was a huge admirer of Minnelli, playing explicit homage to him in his 1977 musical New York, New York) - and if the picture were simply an example of directorial virtuosity, it would still rank as one of the five or six greatest musicals ever made. What gives it additional resonance is in how closely the themes and tensions powering the film mirror what was going on behind the scenes. By 1953, the great Fred Astaire was feeling self-conscious about his own career and stature, especially when comparing himself to up-and-comers like Charisse, and you can sense Minnelli constructing The Band Wagon as an outlet for Astaire to exorcise some of these creative demons. His Tony Hunter is a little hungrier, a little nervier, a little more unsettled than any of Astaire's other romantic heroes, and so his fictional rebirth blossoms into an actual one, too. The film would make a great double feature with Birdman.
Finally, Lionsgate is bringing the Atom Egoyan thriller The Captive to Blu-ray. On first glance, The Captive looks like Denis Villeneuve's underrated 2013 Prisoners; as with Prisoners, The Captive deals with the tragic ramifications of losing a child, in this case the sudden disappearance of young Cassandra (Alexia Fast and Peyton Kennedy) and how her absence drives her parents (Ryan Reynolds and Mireille Enos) to destructive acts. Yet while Prisoners maintained an appropriately procedural - and engaging - approach to this drama (barring its too-neat ending), Egoyan can't find the proper tone here. At all. On one end of the spectrum, he's got Reynolds and Enos wrenching real pathos from their situation (special credit must go to Reynolds, who does some of his best work as the anguished father); in the middle, he's got Rosario Dawson and Scott Speedman as criminal investigators on what seems like a low-rent network cop show; and on the complete opposite side, he's got character actor Kevin Durand (3:10 to Yuma, The Strain) hamming it up as a Big Bad so obvious you wonder why Egoyan didn't go the extra mile and give Durand a mustache to twirl. That's not to say Prisoners doesn't risk tonal incoherence - Exhibit A: Jake Gyllenhaal's charismatic but deeply odd turn as the lead cop on the case - but Villeneuve's direction is so assured that all its disparate elements feel very much of a piece. Egoyan, on the other hand, lurches from one subplot to the other with unsteady feet, and he gets no support whatsoever from his and David Fraser's convoluted, ridiculous script. Ultimately, The Captive makes one wonder what happened to Egoyan over the past fifteen years. A once-promising auteur (do not trust anyone who doesn't think that Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter are two of the best films of the 1990s), Egoyan's been slumming it with slightly more upscale versions of the low-rent swill you might find on late-night cable (the pretentious drama Adoration, the softcore wannabe Chloe, the beyond-risible Where the Truth Lies), and The Captive only confirms his transformation into the arthouse world's equivalent of Jim Wynorski. Tedious, tedious stuff.