★★★★★
Five stars

Two’s company, three’s a crowd in Bennett Miller’s latest powerhouse drama. He demonstrated his masterfully controlled direction in Capote and Moneyball, and now Foxcatcher presents a superb continuation of his technique. It’s a quiet, slow, but always ruthlessly tense and uneasy drama based on an inexplicable true story. If you know nothing about the terrible outcome of this twisted tale before watching, you will very quickly gather from the very first scene that the entire film is building up to something unquestionably sinister.

Steve Carell, in an uncustomarily chilling performance, is John Du Pont – an enigmatic millionaire who takes a special interest in 1984 Olympic gold medal winning wrestler Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum) and generously offers to host and mentor the entire American Olympic team at his grand home, Foxcatcher Farm, ready to compete in the 1988 Olympics in Seoul. Mark stands a chance of winning gold again, but he has forever been stuck in the shadow of his elder brother (also a gold medalist), Dave Schultz, played by Mark Ruffalo. When Du Pont acquires Mark – the more isolated and desperate of the brothers – he assumes that Dave will follow suit and join them at Foxcatcher, but Dave is unwilling to leave his wife (Sienna Miller) and children. Du Pont does not take well to being rebuffed.

And so the stage is set. A complicated triangle ensues. Everybody wants something from the other. Du Pont wants to win a gold medal through the Schultz brothers; Mark wants to topple his brother and succeed at Seoul with Du Pont’s generous funding; and Dave, the most selfless of the three, just wants to take care of his little brother and his family. The seeds of tension are planted straight from the start. Du Pont wrestles for Mark’s loyalty; Mark wrestles for Du Pont’s money; Dave wrestles for his brother’s integrity. There’s a lot of wrestling going on. It’s an absurd arrangement, but it comes together because of one thing and one thing only: Du Pont’s money.

Is this a spoilt rich kid who’s always got what he wanted, or a genuinely impassioned man trying to put his wealth to a good purpose and carve a name for himself outside of his family’s fame? It’s hard to tell. Du Pont is ludicrously frivolous with his wealth at times (we see him strop when a tank he ordered arrives without the correct guns on top), so why should he be taken seriously when he decides on a whim to single-handedly take on the entire USA Olympic wrestling team? The answer is simple. Because he can afford it, and nobody else can afford to question it. There are unspoken allusions to class divide throughout Foxcatcher, and the integral fact of the film is that everything that happens happens because of John Du Pont’s fortune. After we first see Mark at the beginning of the film and the near-destitute state of his life, it’s no surprise to us when he leaps at the opportunity to go to Foxcatcher when Du Pont contacts him on the phone. But Du Pont is using Mark just as much as Mark is using Du Pont. For John, Mark is just a vessel – or, in his own words, an “ape” – through which he can align himself with a great American success. It’s a strangely touching sentiment despite its seemingly random origins.

Wrestling is an unusual sport for Du Pont to take up. He comes from a family of upper-class equestrian competitors, and we never learn exactly where his enthusiasm for the sport has come from. It’s not entirely clear from some rather suggestive scenes as to whether wrestling provides for Du Pont some kind of homoerotic or simply paternal pleasure, but either way he is absorbed by a very masculine obsession. In fact, there are very few women in the entire film. Sexuality is not something ever talked about in Foxcatcher – it’s as if it provides nothing but a distraction from Du Pont’s dream. Dave is the only member of the main trio with a wife and family, and there is no doubt that Du Pont resents his attachment to them. Dave appears to have his life in fine shape altogether, and it’s highly probable Du Pont envies that above all else.

Du Pont emerges at times as something of a Norman Bates figure, hopelessly yearning for the approval of his elderly mother (Vanessa Redgrave). In one fantastically uncomfortable scene, Du Pont attempts to show off his prowess in the wrestling field in front of his mother, who is always telling him that she believes it to be a “low” sport. As his mother watches silently from her wheelchair, Du Pont plays inspirational coach to his team and even, rather awkwardly, tries to demonstrate some moves for himself. When he looks up, his mother is gone.

Is that what this is all about then? Is Du Pont’s entire grand gesture of committing himself to the Olympic team just one big scheme to prove himself to his judgemental mother? It never feels right to sympathise with Du Pont, but Miller seems to try every now and again to make us understand where his final impulsive act comes from. It’s a tricky balancing act for Miller because there can of course be no justification for what Du Pont does, but at the same time we crave some kind of explanation. If it has to be said, the one major pothole of the film – into which it seems to frequently stumble – is that we never really get a rational reason for Du Pont’s terrible crime. But, then again, perhaps we don’t need to. It’s far from a rational act, to say the least. Perhaps Miller doesn’t see it worth cracking into the deranged mind of John Du Pont because there really is no deep psychological trauma – there really is no profound mental inhibition – this is a man who acts entirely of his own irrational accord, and there is no way to justify his actions, no matter how far we delve into his subconscious.

It’s worth taking a moment to appreciate the sheer acting talent on display in this film. Steve Carell is, quite possibly, in the process of changing his entire career. It’s not that we hadn’t seen him tackle dramatic roles before (Little Miss Sunshine comes to mind), but it is a shock to see him plunge so deeply into this character. Once you’ve got past the obtrusive prosthetic nose, it isn’t hard to appreciate Carell’s introverted and harrowing brilliance. In Du Pont, the actor has found a role he can really sink his teeth into and it’s almost a moment of pride to see him rise to the challenge. Before long, you find yourself covering up the goosebumps he sends down your arms. Undeniably, Channing Tatum is also re-shaping his Hollywood image. After Magic Mike, he’s proven that there’s more than meets the eye, but Foxcatcher has taken him wildly out of his comfort zone, to astonishingly impressive results. Tatum’s Mark is brutish and insecure. In one scene, we see Tatum completely and utterly inhabiting Mark’s downtrodden frustration as he smashes his head into a mirror repeatedly. The final segment of the trio, however, who must by no means by exempt from praise, is Mark Ruffalo as Dave Schultz. Ruffalo is quite revelatory in a tenderly sincere portrayal of a big brother looking out for his little brother. He is understated and fiercely protective of his family, which makes the final scenes all the more excruciatingly heart wrenching. There is sure to be an Oscar nomination coming Ruffalo’s way in the Supporting Actor category.

This is not so much a sports movie as a gritty drama concerning sport, rather like Raging Bull or Million Dollar Baby, but the idea of wrestling serves as a suitable metaphor for what’s really going on here. Du Pont and Mark Schultz are both out for themselves – they are in the game to win, and they’re not afraid to take each other down to gain that coveted gold. Dave Schultz dares to show some form of altruism and go head-to-head with Du Pont in looking out for his little brother, and his fate ends in tragedy. Miller has created a disturbingly bleak picture of modern America.

“People, they love blood. They love action. Not this talky, depressing, philosophical bullshit” sneers Birdman, mocking his pathetic actor alias Riggan Thomson. This taunt, along with the dual title, delivers the integral tension of the movie; the age old battle of popularity vs. prestige, high culture vs. low culture, celebrity vs. artist. In the era of reality television and the Transformers franchise, Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) is the perfect meta-critical response, and, after all, Oxford students love ‘meta’. It poses behind its trailer as a popular action movie of the people, but in reality it is much more akin to the ‘talky philosophical bullshit’ that the subtitle suggests – offering its audience a taster of both movies, but surrendering its integrity to neither.

Riggan Thomson is a washed up actor, famed for his role as ‘Birdman’, trying to kick-start the twilight years of his career with a shot of artistic integrity, and so turns to Broadway. He attempts to adapt, star in, and direct Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”. Whether this is brave or merely self-indulgent is something each character questions. The casting of the movie offers another layer of wry self-awareness. Riggan is played by 90’s Batman star Michael Keaton, a former superhero actor in his twilight years. His difficult but highly praised co-star Mike Shiner is played by difficult and highly praised Edward Norton, coincidentally (or not) also former superhero The Hulk. Riggan’s daughter, Sam, is portrayed by Emma Stone, of The Amazing Spiderman franchise– famed for coming out almost immediately after the Spiderman trilogy. Its miraculous success was due to capitalising on social media, updating its image and generally becoming more relevant. These are the very same qualities that Stone’s character attacks her father for lacking in her biting monologue, which criticises his egotistical attempt to shed Birdman and regain the respect of the people.

 Even the aesthetics of the film encapsulate the superhero-cum-super-arty vibe. There are no cuts between shots, and the film is made to look like one continuous take (done by Gravity’s Oscar-winning cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki), a trajectory mirroring the vertigo-inspiring flight sequence of Birdman himself. There is a vibrant percussion score throughout, with occasional appearances from the drummer (Antonio Sanchez), who crops up often and just out of focus, slipping from extra-diagetic to diagetic (a la Mel Brooks’ Western parody Blazing Saddles). Whenever Birdman is reintroduced, it is marked with a dramatic, swooping Hollywood blockbuster number, interrupting the subtle drumming with, of course, an unsubtle superhero theme tune. Birdman is to the theatre what Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation is to writing: so self-conscious of its own self-consciousness, both on and off stage, and both in front of and behind the camera. But this is also its charm.

The supporting cast are amazing. Ed Norton is a real scene-stealer despite his character being, at times, so blinded by his own arrogance and misogyny that it makes for uncomfortable viewing. Andrea Riseborough’s original and refreshing turn as Riggan’s younger girlfriend and co-star doesn’t get nearly enough screen time, nor does Amy Ryan playing the deeply poignant supportive ex-wife, or Lindsay Duncan’s dragon-like critic, who is seldom seen, but a resonant force. Russell Crowe’s recent comments show the damage done by failing to recognise and support parts for older women, whose careers struggle for longevity as it is, so it bothers me that Emma Stone has been receiving the most praise and nominations, even though I think her performance was the most lacking in nuance. She plays the troubled and stubborn teenager, which a stereotype both written and performed many times before, and often done better.  A couple of scenes in the film sit uneasily as well – such as Laura (Riseborough) and Lesley’s (Watts) moment of vulnerable solidarity in the dressing room, which leads into an arbitrary lesbian kiss. It is never explained or explored, which is a shame, as it becomes reduced to mere voyeurism, rather than an honest interaction.

The titan of the film is naturally Keaton. He stated in an interview, “I probably relate less to this character than anyone I’ve ever done… that’s the irony”, but one cannot help feel deeply invested in his comeback, as well as Riggan’s. The line between Keaton and Riggan, as well as Riggan’s imagination and his reality, becomes increasingly blurred. Riggan smashes up his dressing room with superhuman rage, but when his lawyer Jake (Zach Galifanikis) walks in, and intrudes on his fantasy, we are shown a pathetic, aging man throwing a tantrum. He oscillates between headstrong and passionate, to crumbling and fragile. When he walks down a street in New York, with Macbeth’s soliloquy being shouted in the background by a gravelly-voiced homeless man, one wonders whether his stunt will pay off, or if he too is on a tragic downward spiral of ego and ambition. But the film never answers this. On every matter – Riggan’s sanity, the morality of each character, the ideals of fame – the film is ambiguous, and offers us no answers. Having been made painstakingly aware of our role as the critic, we are forced to conceive our own.

★★★☆☆
Three stars

On the surface, The Theory of Everything ticks a lot of boxes for forthcoming success in the movie awards season: an able-bodied actor playing a disabled character, a plot about an underdog who succeeds in the face of all the odds, a personal drama flecked with existential questions about creation and the nature of the universe. It’s a truly exotic mixture of domestic turmoil, the acute reality of disability and supernovas.

The film charts the remarkable life of Professor Stephen Hawking, the physicist known for his pioneering theories about the universe’s origins and his lifelong battle against motor neurone disease. Constructed as a chronological tale that follows Hawking from his days as an awkward Cambridge graduate through to international scientific superstar, the plot covers in equal measure his personal battles. It not only covers Hawking’s attempts to prove a diagnosis of a two year life expectancy wrong, but also the struggles his wife confronts in the face of a husband who is physically degenerating.

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The film is foremost a performance-driven piece, and these struggles between husband and wife are brought to life by the captivating central performances of Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones. Jones brings tremendous emotional credibility to the character of Jane Hawking, who is burdened with the realities of her husband’s burgeoning success. Whilst Stephen enjoys worldwide academic acclaim, Jane is confronted with the mundane exigencies of everyday life: clothing, washing, feeding and caring for a husband in a worsening physical state. Caught between an inescapable sense of hopelessness and the perpetual drive to see Stephen carry on, Jones brilliantly and subtly captures the role of a woman whose life becomes dominated by her spouse.

Of course, Redmayne’s towering portrayal is the film’s central talking point, and it is joyous, in parts, to watch. Throughout, the uncanniness of Redmayne’s performance is striking, from the physical twitches, to the facial contortions, down to eye movements and blinks. It is a performance driven by nuance, which never strays into parody, gratuity or distaste. Yet, it is the earlier scenes, of Stephen as a still able-bodied graduate in Cambridge that were the most entrancing. There was something particularly magical about viewing a side of Stephen Hawking none of us would ever have seen or even imagined him as – a socially clumsy, fantastically intelligent and charming university student. Factual accuracy aside, Redmayne perfectly captures an imagined version of Hawking in his youth, and those scenes in Cambridge towards the beginning of the film were by far the most enthralling.

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Yet, there was something deeply incongruous about these brilliant central performances and the film’s numerous flaws. For one, though the performances bring tremendous emotional clout to the personal side of Hawking’s life, the script dumbs down his scientific achievements to a gallingly infantile degree. If there were more than four sentences describing what major breakthroughs in physics Hawking pioneered, I would be surprised. I understand his work to be immensely complex, but I entirely doubt his leading theoretical work about radiation emitted by a black hole is best explained by drawing a spiral in beer foam on a pub table.

Equally, for a film that attempts to chart an enormous, perhaps too large, chunk of Hawking’s life, scenes meant to symbolise the passing of time were done remarkably ineffectually. The montages disguised as vintage home-movie clips, shot in an almost Instragram-filter-esque homage to 1980’s handheld camcorder footage, were particularly naff and felt deeply out of place with the rest of the film’s beautiful, and measured, cinematography. The all-too-frequent use of these scarcely disguised sequences only served to highlight that the script couldn’t tackle so much of a very eventful life.

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Moreover, the script quickly became formulaic, with these passing-of-time moments often used to break up the repeated sequence of academic advance tarnished by a personal setback. Whether that was Stephen gaining a PhD, yet simultaneously resigning himself to life in a wheelchair, or the publishing of A Brief History of Time, set against him contracting pneumonia and subsequently losing the ability to speak, the script was cyclical to the point of tedium.

And although these personal dramas were effectively realised, it was hard to feel compassion for Jane in these moments. Though acted well by Jones, Jane as a character came across as perpetually frigid and dislikeable; hardly the sympathy-inducing persona the film was trying to fit her into. Equally, her falling in love with family-friend-turned-assistant-carer Jonathan was rendered so blandly that it was hard to feel anything at all for either of them, besides a sense of curiosity as to why the film had dedicated so much time to that side story.

When compared to that other cinematic depiction of genius out at the moment, The Imitation Game, The Theory of Everything is the better film. It is more nuanced in its central depiction, more emotionally evocative without straying into crass sentimentality and far more carefully constructed. Yet, both films suffer from the exact same flaw; inadequate scripts that only serve to impair truly remarkable acting performances.

★★★★★

Five stars

Artists, who were once revolutionary and subversive in their time, seem to lose their edge upon acceptance into the canon. Not so with Egon Schiele. As far as this country is concerned, perhaps Schiele hasn’t even made it into the canon. Indeed, the recent retrospective at the Courtauld gallery in London elicited such a mix of reactions that it seems the artist’s radical, shocking and uncompromising work remains as disputed as ever. Time Out’s Martin Coomer stated bluntly, “With Schiele there is no poetry,” whereas the Financial Times’ Jackie Wullschlager not only dubbed the show the work of an arrested genius but also one of London’s best exhibitions in 2014. 

Either side of this divide, the issue of how to approach Schiele’s sometimes aggressive and disturbing exposition of sexuality features prominently. The conservatives see his work as yet another expiation of obscenity and perversion, foisted upon us by the regrettable tendencies of so-called modern ‘art’. Another approach simply dismisses Schiele as a morbid, promiscuous exhibitionist whose theatrical voyeurism is little more than an adolescent vanity project. But the believers among us see Schiele as a groundbreaking visionary whose works, unnerving as they can be, represent a revolution in the understanding and depiction of sexuality. Whichever side of the debate you fall, this exhibition has to be praised for giving fair representation of everything, from the most “acceptable” to the most provocative. 

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For me some of Schiele’s most affecting works, are the most difficult to process. In haunting self-portraits, such as ‘Nude Self-Portrait in Gray with Open Mouth,’ Schiele depicts himself naked in arresting contortions, coloured in sickly pallid tones. These paintings do not merely show angst, they portray an angst that reaches out a sickly hand and drags you into its horror. Then there are the unnervingly sensual nudes – ‘Mother and Child,’ for example, is pictured in full oedipal transgression and the undeniable eroticism of the figure sits uncomfortably with the incestuous setting in which it appears. Perhaps it’s becoming clear why ‘Schiele, the radical nude’ is the first ever-major Schiele exhibition in Britain.

The acuity of the effect also owes much to the thinking behind the arrangement. Following a broadly chronological pattern, we trace some of the early works before the war in preparation for a large, second room in which we see the artist in full maturity. What makes the arrangement so compelling is how curator Barnaby Wright shows a dissonance between the form and content in Schiele’s work. For example, the first series of paintings were primarily solitary female nudes. Yet stylistically they felt very different; some of them highlighted Schiele’s very particular reverence for the female form, fetishizing curves in sensuous poses. Others depicted the same subject with a radically different effect – not erotic but graphic, even grotesque. Yet they were in many ways identical to the previous portraits. This careful design of the exhibition very cleverly used Schiele’s dynamism, to make the viewing experience consistently intriguing and surprising.

In addition to Schiele’s expressive range, the exhibition highlights his immense technical ability. Peer closely and you find a calculated method in the madness. For example, look at the precision of Schiele’s brushwork. His lines are at once strikingly bold and incisive, yet always conveying a hazy dreamlike effect that makes his pictures feel like part of a hallucination. There is also a subtle beauty in his composition with colour. His palette is for the most part confined to shades of red and orange, yet paradoxically, this restriction is what makes his work so expressive and lyrical. Indeed, the subtle mixtures and layering of tones create some truly beautiful combinations. It is also undeniable that Schiele is a virtuoso of figurative painting. As unpleasant as his deformed specimens are, they show an exceptional ability in execution and conception.

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In short, if not for pure curiosity, or even the opportunity to have a good grumble, I would seriously recommend you take a look at this exhibition. See on which side of the divide it will cast you, unlike much contemporary art, it will cast you on one side or the other. Schiele’s liminal status in the canon, reminds us that before the platitudes of later critics, the work of the great painters was never as easy to deal with as the art books now suggest. In this regard, this exhibtion gives us a sense of history as it was in its moment. Even now the startling nature of Schiele’s work conveys the radicalism and vitality with which his generation changed the art world.  

“Schiele: The Radical Nude” is showing at the Courtauld in Somerset House until the 18th of January 2015.