Steve Carell wins in 'Foxcatcher'
TORONTO - It's the oldest show business cliche in the book: the comedian who yearns to be taken seriously. With Steve Carell, though, it's different. He proved early on with his performance as the suicidal gay uncle in 'Little Miss Sunshine' (2006) that he could rein it in and play to our sympathies. For every Brick Tamland in 'Anchorman' there's a Cal Weaver in 'Crazy, Stupid, Love,' for every 40-year-old virgin a Dan in Real Life.
We already knew he was an actor, in other words. We just never knew how good.
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With ' Foxcatcher,' opening Wednesday, audiences get a chance to see just how good Carell can be. Ironically, it comes at the expense of his physical appearance. To play John E. du Pont III, the wealthy, upper-crust wrestling enthusiast and Olympic team sponsor who on Jan. 26, 1996, shot to death coach Dave Schultz in the driveway of Schultz's Pennsylvania home, Carell underwent a physical and seemingly spiritual makeover.
Directed by Bennett Miller ('Capote,' 'Moneyball'), the new film is restrained to a fault - a creepy, methodical look beneath the hood of American privilege and madness, where daddy issues transmute into an obsession with winning, and where resentments can burn like a sod fire under a perfectly manicured lawn. As Dave Schultz, Mark Ruffalo gives another committed, convincing performance. As his damaged little brother, wrestler Mark Schultz, Channing Tatum has a long-awaited career breakthrough.
But ever since 'Foxcatcher' debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May, Carell has been all everyone wants to talk about. In September, the movie made its way first to the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado and then the Toronto International Film Festival, its stars and director following along. And because Carell transforms himself so completely in this role - and because when our celebrities become unrecognizable we search for the nearest explanation at hand - a lot of people have focused on The Nose.
Articles have been written about the prosthetic nose Carell wore to become du Pont in the film. Is it a lucky nose, like the one that helped Nicole Kidman to an Oscar in 'The Hours' or made Steve Martin so lovable in 'Roxanne'? Is it the nose from Woody Allen's 'Sleeper,' thawed out after 40 years on ice?
Carell is tired of talking about it, actually. 'It's much more than a nose,' he says with good-natured impatience. The Acton-born actor, centered and chatty, is in a meeting room in Toronto on day five of the festival; 'Foxcatcher' is wowing audiences here as it has done elsewhere and Carell is struggling to convey the process of becoming a withdrawn, paranoid, unimaginably wealthy man. The nose is incidental, and yet it's not.
'Bill Corso, who's the artist who designed the look, would come to my house and we would just play with different configurations,' says Carell, describing the six months it took to re-create du Pont for the movie. 'It wasn't in any of our minds about just plopping on a nose.'
Yet the physical transformation seems to have bled inside to support the performance, and it created a useful barrier as well between Carell and the rest of the cast. Says the actor, 'I'd be there [in makeup] three hours before everybody else in the morning. By the time everybody arrived, I'd be looking like du Pont, so people immediately started treating me like du Pont. I immediately felt a separation from everybody else, which was where I needed to be. Really, people mostly saw me as du Pont for those three, four months, and I think that was a good thing.'
It came in handy for spooking the horses too. One of the most inarticulately moving sequences in 'Foxcatcher' comes after du Pont's aged, disapproving mother (Vanessa Redgrave) dies, and her son wanders down to the stables where she kept the horses she loved and he hates.
'We were hoping there was something about me that would make this one horse move away,' Carell says. 'And as we shot it, the horse just turns and walks to the back. There was a weird energy that I had with that animal that he was, like, 'I don't want to be around you.' There was the mother laid into that like she was embodied in that.'
'There's a lot in the film that was intentionally buried and not stated,' says Bennett Miller, speaking to a reporter in Toronto shortly before Carell enters the room. 'The father issues: Both Mark Schultz and du Pont were two when their fathers left. The founding fathers, patriotism, being a patron, being a coach. Also America itself, the patricide of the revolution. It's all just there, and I wanted to look at it, but not in the way we're familiar with in editorials and commentary. Look at it - mourn it.'
Carell is in agreement that less is more, and he backed off from portraying du Pont as eccentrically as the man was rumored to be in real life. 'I didn't want it to be kind of a scenery-chewing manifestation of some mentally unstable person,' he says. 'It's just showing restraint. I think sometimes what is not spoken is so much more powerful. Or not pointed to, or gently alluded to, as opposed to laying it in your lap.'
Miller, in his precise fashion, likens Carell's performance and 'Foxcatcher' in general to a Japanese rock garden, where traditionally the amount of rock that's visible can be only 10 percent of the actual stone. 'The idea is that you feel it,' he says. 'I found that it was OK to sink the movie down more and more and more to the most haiku place, where you've got these islands and you've got this space and the silences in between.'
All this causes one to wonder: What drew Miller to Carell in the first place, and what made Carell think he could make the leap? The answers seem to be intuition and faith. 'It wasn't something that I lobbied for,' says the actor. 'I thought, if he thinks I can do it, then I can do it. That was really my take: Bennett's other films are so good and specific and elegant that he probably knows something.'
For Miller, casting against type - against our expectations of who Steve Carell is - were part of the choice. 'There's a perception of Steve and the kinds of characters he plays as benign, non-threatening,' the director says. 'All of his characters have a mushy center. You don't expect him to do the things that du Pont did, which is how it felt for everybody down there. Nobody expected du Pont to do the thing that du Pont did. He, too, was mistaken for having a mushy center.
Miller pauses and lands on the point that separates actors from the people they play and the people they seem to be. 'Steve Carell,' he says, 'does not have a mushy center. You do not end up being him and having his measure of success by being soft.'
Related coverage:
- Toronto, day 5: Carell, Tatum in 'Foxcatcher'
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @tyburr.
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