MOVIE REVIEW: Foxcatcher

Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo in Foxcatcher

Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo in Foxcatcher

Published Jan 2, 2015

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FOXCATCHER

DIRECTOR: Bennet Miller

CAST: Steve Carrell, Channing Tatum, Mark Ruffalo, Sienna Miller, Vanessa Redgrave

CLASSIFICATION: 13 V

RUNNING TIME: 133 minutes

RATING: 4 stars (out of 5)

Ann Hornaday

A BLEAK, mid-wintery gloom suffuses Foxcatcher, a dramatised version of the lurid real-life murder of champion wrestler Dave Schultz at the hands of the late John E du Pont in 1996.

As refracted through the chilly, superbly controlled lens of director Bennett Miller, the otherwise tawdry tale of ambition, self-deception and mental illness becomes an unsettling allegory of violence and love at their most ritualised and repressed.

Foxcatcher exerts a mesmerising pull, not only because it affords the chance to witness three fine actors working at the height of their powers, but also because it steadfastly resists the urge to clutter up empty space with the filigree of gratuitous imagery and chatter.

It may not be conventionally fun to watch, but it has the courage of its convictions, allowing the story to remain as it was: bizarre, bewildering, twisted and terribly sad. It’s a haunting, deeply troubling movie, as ill at ease and unresolved as the curious relationship at its ice-cold centre.

That relationship wasn’t between John du Pont (Carell) and Dave Schultz (Ruffalo), but between Du Pont and Schultz’s younger brother Mark (Tatum).

As Foxcatcher opens, Mark has gone from being an Olympic-gold-medal-winning wrestler to speaking at high school assemblies and working out with his far more stable brother.

As portrayed by Tatum and Ruffalo, the brothers have the stooped, muscle-bound shuffle of lifelong athletes as well as a bear-like, instinctive intimacy. Their warm-up and practice bouts project equal parts affection and brute, thinly veiled aggression and resentment.

During one such encounter, it doesn’t take long for Mark to draw blood. For him, it’s clear: the stakes are always just a bit higher.

Mark cuts a forlorn figure who, during the late 1980s, when much of the film transpires, has failed to cash in on Ronald Reagan’s “morning in America”.

Du Pont – who lives with his mother (Redgrave) on an estate known as Foxcatcher and who is hoping to put together an all-star wrestling team to take to the Olympics – reaches out to Mark, flying him to Pennsylvania to see the top-flight training facility Du Pont has in mind.

Soon Mark is living there as protege and playmate to an odd-ball supported by a family fortune generated by war profiteering. At the same time, Du Pont has a deep longing for companionship, intimacy and approval.

But when Du Pont makes a play for Dave, he finds that this brother isn’t as susceptible or needy. While his mother pooh-poohs wrestling as a “low sport” (compared with her preferred pastime of fox hunting), Du Pont finds in Dave his own maddeningly elusive human quarry.

Understandably, Carell – under a prosthetic nose, fake teeth, an imperiously uplifted chin and a halting, adenoidal dialect – is getting much of the attention.

And indeed, Carell’s portrayal represents a breakthrough for someone more associated with comedy and winsome drama.

But what makes the film so spellbinding is its ensemble, anchored by Ruffalo and Tatum. The latter’s acting combines graceful, full-body physical performance with interior dynamics of fine-tuned sensitivity.

Things go from upper-crust eccentric to downright weird in Foxcatcher, especially when Du Pont’s clenched-up impulses finally break free. (No one in the history of cinema has made doing cocaine with a millionaire in his private helicopter look like such a drag.) Still, even at its most sordidly suggestive, the movie always returns to each character’s personal maelstrom of loyalty, competition, loneliness and grief.

Working with a script by E. Max Frye and Dan Futterman, Miller directs Foxcatcher with lots of white space, filling it with silences and big, empty backdrops that capture Du Pont’s abstracted, rarefied life and, in the cosmic scheme of things, the puniness of his endeavour.

He continually tries to connect his ambitions for the wrestlers with the American Dream, urging the team to be heroes in citizenship as well as on the mat, and connecting their purpose to our revolutionary forefathers.

If Miller presents that as a self- valourising stretch, viewers may bristle just as much at his choice to make Foxcatcher a parable of Cold War-era late capitalism. Here is a cautionary tale of the collision between moneyed impunity and simple-folk integrity. – Washington Post

If you liked Capote or The Imitation Game you will like this.

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