Editor’s Note: From time to time I let my lovely and talented husband weigh in on current films, because, as many of you know, he has a unique and entertaining perspective that is often contrary to my own. You’ll find what follows to be pretty amusing:

It’s Brooding Wrestler Vs. Brooding Physicist Smackdown, and the clear winner is…

By James Mandell

Heavy hitter Vs. a heavy witter? Let’s rumble:

Steve Carell stars in Foxcatcher, the bizarre story of John DuPont, purportedly the richest hermit in America in 1987, whose obsession with grown men grabbing at each other leads him to building a world class wrestling facility on his property and wooing America’s best athletes into training there, with salaries and perks. All the better to teach the Russkies a lesson in star-spangled greatness.

Trouble is, neither he nor his protégé, Olympic Gold Medal-winning wrestler Mark Schultz, played by Channing Tatum, have any discernible social or communications skills. Both both quickly find themselves out of their depth in a slow motion character study that is both disarming and relentless.

Meanwhile, in The Theory of Everything, Stephen Hawking (Eddie Redmayne, whom you may remember from the stunning Les Miserables) finds himself in a wonderful position at Cambridge: both onto something meaningful in the quest to relate time to space, and to relate to the love-struck co-ed who would become his first wife, Jane Wilde (Felicity Jones).

The first acts of each conclude menacingly: wrestler detects cracks in his idyllic relationship with new father figure, and physicist discovers cracks in his body’s ability to move one leg after the other. What happens next is all about the art of movie making. And the surprise comes in how imminently watchable one becomes and the other doesn’t.

Foxcatcher quickly devolves into an uneasy puddle. In order to get beneath the surface of their inept exteriors, we wind up focusing on their unfortunate exteriors. Long — painfully long — shots of people sitting perfectly still and thinking about things. Minimal dialog, nothing beyond the next headlock to grab ahold of, nothing to do but wait and wait some more for something, anything, to happen.

The Theory of Everything, on the other hand, blossoms even as its protagonist crumbles. Characters relate ever more meaningfully and lovingly. Work of discovery becomes work of greatness, even as the circumstances deteriorate to seemingly absurd proportions. That’s because this is a movie of spirit, love and triumph, all presented in such a graceful and appealing manner, I found myself transported by its spacey weightlessness. The performances are artful, the story line astonishing, the journey triumphant in a manner that is as touching as it is unique.

As to Foxcatcher, coming in at two hours, 14 minutes – at least an hour too long — it’s 60 seconds of action and the rest a botched rewrite of what was a far more interesting real life drama that played out in the news back then. I found myself dealing with it with my most defensive movie-watching technique: napping in hopes of something interesting shaking me back into consciousness.