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 It is the first time at Cannes for U.S. director Miller,
whose 2005 film "Capote" earned him a nomination as Best
Director at the Academy Awards and a Best Actor win for its
star, the late Philip Seymour Hoffman.
The top-notch cast includes Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo as
Olympic champion brothers Mark and Dave Schultz, and a
cast-against-type and completely unrecognizable Steve Carell as
John du Pont, a role Miller said was "far out of his (Carell's)
comfort zone".
"My athletes consider me as a brother, a father and a leader,"
Du Pont boasts during the film after he establishes a training
camp for amateur wrestlers on the grounds of his family's
sprawling mansion.
But the reality is darker and far less flattering.
An odd character shut inside his world of privilege and
surrounded by his mother's (Vanessa Redgrave) equestrian
trophies, Du Pont suffers from an inferiority complex.
Yet delusions of grandeur, and a deep-seated assumption that
money can buy him anything, see him overstepping his role as
benefactor as he clearly yearns to be part of the team - wearing
a warm-up suit with his athletes and calling himself their coach
and mentor.
Despite the sweat and muscle that are the backdrop, it is a
quiet and intensely psychological film that explores the
ultimately fatal relationship between du Pont and the two
brothers.
"There's a lot of American male repressed non-communication
happening in this film," Miller told journalists and critics at
a press conference. "There's an undercurrent beneath the
undercurrent. Every scene is just the tip of the iceberg."
The real Mark Schultz visited the set during filming.
"Having Mark there was emotionally very intense because he was
sort of reliving a difficult time for him," said Ruffalo. "You
go through a bad time in your life once and then you have to go
through it again on a movie set, that's a little heavy."
As for Carrel, Miller said he had trusted his instincts that the
actor lauded for his skills at comedy could handle the
transformative role.
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Approaching a dramatic role is no different from a comedic one, the
actor said: "I don't think that characters in films know that
they're in a comedy or a drama, they're just characters in a film."
GROSS SELF-ABSORPTION
The prestigious 12-day festival on the palm-lined French Riviera is
now in its sixth day. Also due to hit the red carpet on Monday
evening were Robert Pattinson and Julianna Moore, stars of "Maps to
the Stars" by a Cannes regular, Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg.
Often called Cronenberg's answer to Robert Altman's scathing attack
on Hollywood, 1992's "The Player," the film centers on an aging
actress (Moore) and daughter of a famous film star desperate to land
a role playing her now-dead mother.
Taken to task in Bruce Wagner's script are a myriad of soft targets
that make Hollywood tick - the personal assistants called "chore
whores", the daily healing massages, the teenage stars, limousines
and agents and the gross self-absorption.
Cronenberg denied that his film was Hollywood-centric, saying its
themes of monstrous egotism, callous self-advancement and privilege
applied elsewhere.
"You could set this in Silicon Valley, you could set it on Wall
Street, anywhere people are desperate, ambitious, greedy, fearful,"
Cronenberg said. "You could really set it anywhere and still have
that same tone and same ring of truth."
Reaction to the film after a Sunday night press screening was mixed.
The Hollywood Reporter said it was "a prank more than a coherent
take on 21st century Hollywood" and, in a broadly positive review,
Britain's Guardian called it "vivisectional in its sadism and
scorn".
(Additional reporting by Michael Roddy; Editing by John Stonestreet)
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