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Foxcatcher (Movie Review)
by Spencer Moldea
FIVE STARS OUT OF FIVE
In the five days since I initially saw it, I’ve failed to recall a single viewing experience as deeply and wholly unsettling as Foxcatcher. It is a film of unprecedented pathos delivered with the petrifying disquiet of watching a butterfly syringe hovering above a tender, swollen vein. Instead of illuminating the successes and failures of its subjects, it attempts to see into them through the anxiety of their own debilitating ambitions. Perhaps the most enduring mantra of the American ethos is the call to aspire to greatness and to commit to creating something exceptional for yourself. But what if that isn’t good enough? In the eyes of history, we are remembered by the heights we reach in our short lives, but how does one born into the accomplishments of other people create a greatness that is entirely his-or-her own? The film is less interested in the question itself than it is in its ability to rot the spirit from the inside out. It’s a grisly picture with devastating impact and great emotional insight, and the fact that its central crime is rooted in the recent past only serves to make it more disturbing, more heart-shattering.
Mark Schultz, an Olympic Gold medal winner, has spent the entirety of his life in the shadow of his older brother, Dave Schultz. Miraculously, they’ve both brought home Olympic gold, something that appears to be essential to their bond as siblings, and yet in his own words, his accomplishments always seem to be attributed to his brother. At the beginning of the film, Mark visits an elementary school to talk to the children about wrestling, the Olympics, and America. When it comes time to write him a check for his services, he is assumed to be Dave Schultz, as if Mark Schultz never existed and Mark is simply an agent of the Dave Schultz brand. It’s a very small moment, but it lays bare the pain of what we can assume has been Mark’s whole existence; through his eyes and others, he does not exist as anything but 50% of the Dave Schultz pair. To make matters worse, despite their equal achievement, Dave is demonstrably the better wrestler. In one of the film’s crowning moments, the two spar with each other, and in this nearly wordless ritual, everything about their relationship and history is concisely expressed. Mark goes down, but Dave is there for consolation and guidance, just as he always was. After all, “rivalry” is too simplistic a word to attribute to Mark and Dave. Mark does not hate his brother. He loves him as a brother and as a father, which is part of the problem; every child must be distanced from its parents, but what if your brother was the only real parent you ever had?
Enter one particularly empty afternoon in Mark’s life, the silence of which is suddenly broken by a phone call. On the other end is a gentleman speaking on behalf of a John E. Du Pont, and he tells Mark that Mr. Du Pont would like to fly him point-blank all the way out to his lavish Pennsylvania estate (first class, of course) to meet and discuss a potential partnership, the details of which are kept secret. The fact that Mark agrees seemingly without contest should speak volumes about just how lost he is— flying to Pennsylvania on someone else’s dime to see a man he’s never heard of, let alone met?— but I’m sure that in his conscious mind, it was just another business call, another proposition. When they finally meet, Du Pont describes himself as an ornithologist, pentathlon enthusiast, wrestling coach, and patriot who seeks to form a team based out of the estate, so named Foxcatcher Farm. This team, as he sells it, would not simply be a competitive sporting group but a symbol of American splendor to which the entire country will eventually aspire. Perhaps, Du Pont suggests, through the victories made by team Foxcatcher, he and Mark could inspire the world and change what he sees as the decaying state of the American ideal into something resembling its former glory.
John Du Pont, greying into his late fifties, could kindly be described as a man of particularly singular presence and alternately described as being one of the most intrinsically alienating people I have ever seen, both on and off the screen. Every cue, from his smile to his unorthodox manner of blinking, suggests a man on the verge of collapsing into a singularity of loneliness and long-gestating psychosis. Anyone in his company should have no trouble suspecting what’s on the end of any extended interaction with a man that hopelessly troubled, yet there Mark was, baited by John’s every word. Behind the stilted, labored diction, there seemed to be a truth in Du Pont designed specifically for Mark’s understanding.He asks Mark what he hopes to achieve, to which he responds, “I want to be the best in the world.” This line, performed by Channing Tatum in one of his finest roles to date, is spoken not as an inspiring movie moment but as the admission that would bring about the gradual dissolution of nearly everyone in Mark’s life. For those unfamiliar with the John Du Pont case, I won’t go any further.
Several reviews have accused Foxcatcher of being too chilly and enigmatic for its own good. After having spent several days sorting through my own thoughts and responses, I have to wonder if this is simply a defense mechanism against the film’s deceptively quiet power. I can’t say I blame them; it’s difficult to know how to confront a film that so cleanly and swiftly cuts straight through you. Yes, it stuns you into submission through all-too-unpleasant means, but only in that it neither condescends to its audience nor sullies the complexity of its material by explicitly explaining itself. The film, penned by Dan Futterman and E. Max Frye, unfolds in subtle moments of suggestion, all directed with patience and emotional objectivity by Bennet Miller. Not since Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master have I seen a movie so meticulously and deliberately crafted in its every frame. Since Capote, Miller has been committed to the idea that simplicity is poetry, and in this film, he demonstrates mastery so distilled and refined that even the gentle music of Clint Eastwood begins to look bombastic in comparison. The film is so completely absent of stylistic flourish and technical indulgence that even the most minuscule camera movements suddenly roar with significance. Even Rob Simonsen’s score, rather than accentuating emotional moments, rarely does more than underline the butterflies already accumulating in your stomach, and when these characters say so much on their own, why should anything further be needed?
This stillness, rather than stifling the experience, produces a sensation akin to screaming internally. These characters are oppressed by the very air they breathe, and with every stillborn shot, the air only gets thicker. Yet the film is one of incredible humanity, not because the filmmaking is inherently tender, but because it gives the characters the time and, crucially, the space to make human beings out of themselves, even when those human beings are tangled and constricted by the most horrifying of circumstances. The film is based around the sport of wrestling, and yet wrestling has never seemed like less of a sport in the traditional sense. Through the lens of Miller and cinematographer Greig Frasier, the violence has been stripped of all impact and visceral context, leaving only raw, stripped-down masculine intimacy. From watching the film, wrestling becomes less about the violence and more acutely about feeling your opponent’s body and knowing it just as well as you know your own. The first sparring match between brothers feels less like exhausting frustration and aggression and more like an animalistic expression of mutual respect. It is mesmerizing to watch.
Circulating throughout the Internet at the moment is an awards banquet video from 1988 featuring John Du Pont and elaborating on his accomplishments. Watching that video only made the casting of Steve Carrell seem all the more perplexing. He neither sounds nor looks like Du Pont, and while the makeup is a marvel, the resulting figure is not a spitting image. Then I actually saw the film. There are a handful of career best performances in this film, ranging from Sienna Miller to Mark Ruffalo’s most nuanced and modulated work yet, but what Steve Carrell commits to is not so much a performance but an act of possession. He may not look like Du Pont or sound like Du Pont, but in his every blink, smile, and vocal wisp, Carrell seems to have hollowed out his body and allowed the ghost of John E. Du Pont to inhabit and animate him. It is the single most uncanny demonstration of acting I have seen since Daniel Day-Lewis’s incarnation of Abraham Lincoln two years ago, and despite what that description might seem to imply, it isn’t simply a spot-on impression. I fail to name more than 10 actors from memory who have delved the depths that Steve Carrell explores in this movie. He looks into the soul of cracked, sick human being and sees not a monster but a man poisoned by neglect, self-righteousness, and friendlessness. He doesn’t play him as a pathetic or frightening person, but by seeing through the eyes of Du Pont and staying true to the nature of who he sincerely seemed to be, he finds himself becoming one anyway. Behind his donations to hospitals, his assistance in police investigations, and his contributions to the study of birds, John Du Pont was simply an empty, nebbishy man on quest to establish himself as a model American, someone admirable and opposite to who he truly was.
The beauty of this movie is that its many layers harbor countless interpretations and thematic revelations, but for now, consider this: approximately halfway through the film, John explains to Mark that he only ever had one true friend in his life, a boy who played with him in his youth. When he was a teenager, Du Pont’s mother, played ice-cold by Vanessa Redgrave, revealed to him that she had been paying the boy to be his friend the entire time. In some sense, he had found someone new to pay to be his friend in Mark Schultz. The entire Foxcatcher Farm became an aggregate of people to distract (or perhaps elevate) himself from his inner reality. Ultimately, this was likely the very delusion that drew Mark to Du Pont in the first place. In America, you can become anyone you want to be, except the person you can’t be, which is the person you always want to be. Like Mark, Du Pont was simply on a desperate search for ways of escaping the identity into which he had been born, and joining each other to build Team Foxcatcher was the most immediate method of fulfilling those needs. What role Dave Schultz plays in this scheme is something I can’t reveal at the risk of spoiling several surprises, but I can say the tragedy of the story begins and ends with him, and perhaps not in the way you think.
Spencer Moleda is a freelance writer, script supervisor, and motion picture researcher residing in Los Angeles, California. His experience ranges from reviewing movies to providing creative guidance to fledgling film projects. You can reach him at: www.spencermoleda.com
EDITOR’S NOTE: In putting this review on TMV the wrong title was put on the title of this movie in the title on the actual post by us. This was not in the original review. We regret our error.