Selma, American Sniper and Foxcatcher: See them for the performances, not for the history

It took a couple of extra weeks, but as of Friday, we’re finally done with 2014’s solemn movie histories — just in time to hear about them constantly as the Oscars approach. Last week, Selma, about the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and his followers’ 1965 civil rights march in Alabama, got here. And this week brings American Sniper and Foxcatcher, the former based on U.S. Navy sniper Chris Kyle’s chest-thumping memoir and the latter about Steve Carell’s homicidal nose.

Each has raised eyebrows or tempers — that is, temporarily raised publicists’ rates — by veering from established chronology or facts to heighten the drama or deepen a character. Such liberties are nothing new (they are, in fact, ancient), and neither is the mostly manufactured furor about “accuracy,” that word forever ambered within those giggle quotes, looking out helplessly at the op-ed writers and contrarians who use it to test drama for social worth.

Selma isn’t going to fail any broad tests of social worth — it is the sort of production about which commentators are apt to say (and are now saying, with Ferguson in mind), “We need this now more than ever” — though director Ava DuVernay and writer Paul Webb’s cheats with the record are not minor. President Lyndon B. Johnson, depicted here in his scenes with King as an exasperated horse trader, was more sympathetic to King than JFK had been (and not as easily manipulated by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover as Selma unfortunately suggests). King and Johnson understood politics and their places in history with deep savvy and nuance, and they reached their shared complex moment from compelling individual places. Making Selma‘s incarnation of LBJ two-dimensionally adversarial is unfair to both men and to the audience.

You don’t notice this immediately, thanks to David Oyelowo, whose performance as King renders any handful of gerund-y adjectives — haunting, blistering, astonishing — banal. He’ll send you running for author Taylor Branch’s trilogy or for YouTube, not to contradict the movie but simply to learn more about the figure whom Oyelowo brings to life.

As for Johnson, Tom Wilkinson (like Oyelowo, a British actor) plays him as big and canny and impatient, bringing welcome domination to a fine scene shared with Tim Roth (another Englishman, who oozes into Alabama Gov. George Wallace’s shit-covered shoes). But he and DuVernay fail to make the most of the “we shall overcome” segment of LBJ’s joint-session address calling for the Voting Rights Act. Wilkinson is both too actorly and too plain there, and the moment feels rushed. (The full speech is on the Internet, and it remains intensely moving.)

By then, though, Selma — despite its contrivances and some clumsy editing — has done what it set out to do. It makes you mad (the violence is, correctly, very ugly), makes you grateful (for what King and Johnson did, separately and together) and makes you remember (would that the U.S. Supreme Court remembered so well).

Director Clint Eastwood and his American Sniper screenwriter, Jason Hall, forget a few things about their subject — chiefly that Kyle’s book is more glibly boastful than selflessly duty-driven. Bradley Cooper, whose gifts in the past have tilted toward glib, boastful characters, transcends both the material and himself as Kyle. The first time I watched Sniper, I let Eastwood’s impressively staged combat scenes and Cooper’s quantum-leap performance convince me that I’d seen a great movie. After I put it on my 2014 top-10 list, I looked again and saw something more corn than grit — except for Cooper, who was even better on second viewing. It’s debatable whether Sniper has much to say about war. But about one warrior — about this movie’s airbrushed version of Kyle — Cooper says as much as any actor ever has.

Foxcatcher may be more about acting than about any particular American moment or tendency, other than that of Americans to assume roles when opportunity allows. If you like director Bennett Miller’s previous constructions — Capote and Moneyball — then this rounds out a chilly, supremely performance-driven trilogy. I do like all three movies, and there’s not another recent ensemble like that of Carell, Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo, each brilliant underneath (and despite) distracting cosmetic alterations. But I’m hard-pressed to detail what else makes Foxcatcher good or whether acting alone makes it truly great. It’s factually opaque (the sequence of real events is an afterthought), but the facts surrounding John E. du Pont’s fascination with wrestling brothers Mark and Dave Schultz doesn’t bear strongly on the broader historic current. If anything, you want more fiction in it, more occurrence and less portent.