Each weekend a profile on a just-opened Oscar contender. Here's abstew on this weekend's new release, Bennett Miller's chilling FOXCATCHER, which won him Best Director at Cannes.
Channing Tatum as Mark Schultz in Foxcatcher
Born: Channing Matthew Tatum was born April 26, 1980 in Cullman, Alabama
The Role: Bennett Miller, the Academy Award nominated director of Capote (2005) and Moneyball (2011), takes on another film based on a true story. Tatum stars as wrestler and Olympic gold medalist Mark Schultz as he struggles to get by (surviving on ramen and taking $20 inspirational speech gigs) and to ultimately step out of the shadow of his older brother, fellow wrestler and gold medalist, Dave Schultz (Best Supporting Actor contender, Mark Ruffalo). Mark is soon contacted by an eccentric billionaire (Steve Carell playing John du Pont) that encourages Mark (and eventually Dave) to come to his estate near Valley Forge, named Foxcatcher, to train the athletes on his compound.
Tatum met with Miller years before the project got off the ground, but initially passed on the role then fearing he wasn't yet ready to tackle the dark places the character goes. Once the film was set to go into production, Tatum was ready for the challenge, transforming himself physically (he gained 20 pounds of muscle and trained as a wrestler) and emotionally (Tatum was so intense in one scene where Mark smashes his head in a mirror that he actually cut his own head and put a hole in the wall).
Previous Brushes With Oscar: Although Tatum has worked with celebrated directors Steven Soderbergh, Michael Mann, and Ron Howard, he has yet to appear in a film that has been nominated for an Oscar. For his work in 2006's A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, Tatum received an Independent Spirit Award nomination and the film received a Special Jury prize at Sundance for its ensemble. And Foxcatcher isn't the only film he was apart of this year looking for Oscar recognition. He voiced both Superman in The Lego Movie and Joaquin in The Book of Life, both looking to score Best Animated Feature Film nominations.
What Critics Are Saying:
And do not underestimate Mr. Tatum, who goes through his wrestling maneuvers the same way he played the male stripper in Magic Mike—with fastidiously timed precision. For anyone who thinks of him as just another over-publicized hunk who got lucky, listen up. As an athlete going down for the count, this is his juiciest role to date—and he plays it like a hungry man heading for a steak house with somebody else’s credit card.
-Rex Reed New York Observer
But the real revelation may be Channing Tatum, as Schultz' younger brother, Mark. Tatum has always looked like a simple, thick-necked jock — and he's cleverly used that, building a career on playing sweet dumb decent guys (who may be smarter than they look). But here he finds an edge to that.
-Stephen Whitty Newark Star-Ledger
...Channing Tatum’s performance as the nearly monosyllabic Mark Schultz is arguably even more delicate. Tatum excels at playing men who are at home in their bodies but at sea in the social world, and we can feel Mark’s yearning to find a father figure...
-Andrew O'Hehir Salon.com
But Tatum's the one who turns himself inside out here, and there are long stretches of the film where it's just Mark onscreen that are emotionally brutal and almost too hard to watch.
-Drew McWeeny HitFix: Motion Captured
Tatum channels Mark's complexities into his mesmerizing physicality, all brute animal force and lightning reflexes which crumple at every opportunity into a dejected heap of defeat. He makes Mark into a fearsome specimen who nevertheless exudes pure vulnerability. If another reviewer wanted to draw a comparison to DeNiro in Raging Bull, I wouldn’t laugh them out of the room
-Michael Cusumano, The Film Experience
My Take: Awkwardly lumbering onscreen with an underbite and constantly clenched jaw to go with his scowl, Tatum's Mark Schultz is a man that is not at peace. Lost and confused, he continuously wrestles internally with himself (his struggle has a tendency to manifest itself outwardly as he self inflicts physical abuse). Which is why when Carell's du Pont shows interest in him, Mark latches on to the man as a father figure and kindred spirit. Neither has found their place in the world. Searching for acceptance and recognition, they find it in each other. But as Mark descends into the twisted world that du Pont has created, he finds himself withdrawing even further. When a disturbing late night training session with du Pont seems to be about more than just wrestling, the camera settles on the dead look in Tatum's eyes allowing is to realize that something is not right. But Mark has almost resigned himself to complicity with whatever erratic behavior is imposed on him - until he is no longer the favorite. Tatum charts the depth of Mark's confliction with brooding intensity, but he also strips himself of all the natural charm he usually brings as an actor. His performance, much like the film as a whole, is admirable but distant and off-putting. Although we see Tatum push the limits of how far he can bury into the depths of his psyche, he loses us along the way. The journey he's taking is too personal to bring us with him and the film keeps us too much at a distance to ever even try.
Fun Fact: Everyone knows that Tatum used to work in Florida in the early 2000s as a male stripper and that his story became the inspiration for Magic Mike. But did you know that to pay the bills Tatum was also an Abercrombie model, appeared as a dancer in Ricky Martin's music video for "She Bangs", and was in a Mountain Dew commercial.
Probability of a Nomination: Slight Possibility. It seems that the heat the film generated at Cannes has slowly dissolved the longer the season continues and he faces stiff competition in a crowded field. Even within his own film he'll have to fight for recognition as it seems that pundits have been more impressed with the fact that Steve Carell disappears behind a gigantic fake nose and a dour performance. (I personally found his performance a little one-note and too reliant on that transformative make-up job. I preferred Tatum's work from this film.) Tatum is already a big star able to sell blockbusters and he still seems to fit in challenging work with respected filmmakers. If not with this performance (which may be a little too detached for most Oscar voters), his upcoming work with the Coen Brothers and Quentin Tarantino show that he wants to score that first nomination.
"Foxcatcher" opened in NY and LA yesterday. Check out the website to see when it opens in your city.