Foxcatcher in 200 Words or Less

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You get the sense of the camera sinking, always sinking, as you watch Foxcatcher - we're looking down from not quite a God's Eye angle, somewhere in between, but rolling down quick. Maybe we're meant to be one of the fog-banks that settles over Foxcatcher Farm, the indifferently-built-from-the-outside pet project purgatory of the well-moneyed mad-man supplying this thing its arrhythmic heartbeat - like that weather, like Steve Carell's molasses cadence, we descend to the mat, the muck, the madness.

Bennett Miller's film is probably a mite too reserved and clinical for its own good, too obsessed with trumpeting big things about men-folk and being capital I Important - There's no I in Team, Bennett! But its safety phrase, its tap-me-on-the-head-if-I-get-too-rough, or not-rough-enough, is in being simultaneously balls-out bizarre, a pit-sweat stink-bomb dropped into Oscar season of sneering leering fang-bearing oafs slamming their body parts... in that musky twilight silence. Slaps and grunts and endless things left endlessly unsaid; a poison cloud crossing the manicured Pennsylvanian grasses. You can hear and feel the slap of skin on fresh mats, rubbing itself red with effort; the sweat looks cold, but it's sweat - vital, pulpy, and human - nonetheless.