Steve Carell gives a captivating performance in Foxcatcher. I doubt whether any actor has worn a false nose so well since Robert De Niro's got pummeled into cauliflower in Raging Bull.
That this beak caps off a man who counted ornithology among his interests
is a fringe benefit; that the real John E. du Pont also resembled a
bird of prey has a downright sinister serendipity. Moreover, John was a
scion—with blood as blue as melancholy—and a wrestling coach; and this led him to bring Mark Schultz, a 27-year-old world
champion, into his fold.
The film begins in 1987—three years after Mark (Channing Tatum) was awarded his gold medal in Los Angeles. Wherever he is now, it certainly could use that California sun; he grunts out an inspirational speech for a gray assemblage of elementary-school kids who look too tired to yawn. He trains with his brother Dave (Mark Ruffalo), a fellow Olympic gold medalist who is also a wrestling coach at a university. Between the wife, kids, job, and receding hairline, one wouldn't guess that, in real life, Dave was only a year older than Mark. There's the suggestion that Mark, affectless and laconic, is developmentally disabled—and that's off-putting because it plays into stereotypes about wrestlers, and because Mark wrote the book this movie is based on.
Discomfiting as the suggestion is, it seems to be something Mark has in common with John. Their conversation is so spare it could have been written by Hemingway. The wrestler and the wrestling enthusiast are united after Mark receives a call made on behalf of John du Pont—"of the du Pont family." He's invited to the chemical heir's Pennsylvania estate, which is draped in eternal autumn—as if to imply that it's within John's dynastic power to prevent the leaves from falling, or any cycle from completing—and invited to join Team Foxcatcher. A sententious patriot, and probably long before it was fashionable (as it would have been then; this is the Reagan era, after all), John wants to train Mark—and Mark wants to win the gold—in the interest of national prestige. John also wants Dave to join, so he too can practice next-door to the dowager du Pont's thoroughbred ranch. But Dave declines, citing family obligations: an excuse the others can't much empathize with.
Overall, as a unified work of art, Foxcatcher is a failure; and maybe, because it is a failure, it wouldn't be unfair to apply the favored epithet of those whose impatience is insulted by difficulty: pretentious. But it's an attempt to solve a problem that has always dogged movies based on true stories; this season alone, the chatter around American Sniper is exhibit A, Selma exhibit B, and The Imitation Game exhibit C. (My theory is that the current state of indignation about movie mendacity, even when positively founded, has only cropped up because "historical research" takes only a click or two more than finding a cat video.) This particular story doesn't have the high profile of the War on Terror or the Civil Rights Movement, so perhaps it's as good a test case as any. The director of Foxcatcher, Bennett Miller, is stretching his talent for supple observation into a more exploratory—even painterly—realm.
What this means is that the screenwriters (Dan Futterman and E. Max Frye) have presented the facts of the du Pont case as an outline: a skeletal outline that refuses to make the motives of the people involved sufficiently apparent. In essence, rather than lying about history, or embellishing on it, they're committing a sin of omission—and leaning more than usual on the cast to embody the sort of truths that don't come across on the page. It works and it doesn't. Sometimes it fails simply because the point of view is too narrow. Tatum, for instance, is grade-A beefcake, yet there isn't a whisper of flirtation throughout the chilly corridors of this narrative. Mark stays in ritzy hotel rooms during championships, but never strolls downstairs to the bar to enjoy the perks of his (minor) celebrity. Between him and Dave, not a single autograph is signed nor fan's hand is shaken. Even ugly-duckling John once had a short-lived marriage, but it's never brought up. On the surface, the dynamic between John and Mark parallels the allusive role confusion in The Master, but this imbalance of power overwhelms the burgeoning imbalance of passion. Miller is not a sensual filmmaker.
Of course, the elephant on the mat is wrestling itself. Any red-blooded American with any residue of world-weary irony will spot a wink of sodomy in those moves, and, more convincingly, a B.D.S.M. impulse sublimated in every headlock. But one of the chief virtues of this film is that Miller directs with clear eyes. While some elements may be too understated, nothing is ever overstated, which is the most common tendency—even in movies as good as The Wrestler. Miller believes in the audience and has faith in his cast. Whenever Tatum is in the lurch, he registers his pain with the same helpless sensitivity that makes him astute at comedy. Though they don't look like siblings, he and Ruffalo relate to each other like they are. Dave seemed, with regard to casting, less obviously within Ruffalo's range than John seemed within Carell's; hip irresponsibility was the most salient characteristic of his fair-weather father in The Kids Are All Right, and, in The Brothers Bloom, the proportions of his brotherly love were cosmic. But Dave has the admirable squareness of a person who defaults to responsibility. He isn't tough, in the traditional sense, but his physical confidence is airtight; his voice is light for a coach, so he communicates by touch. While this may sound inauspicious, with the ghost of Jerry Sandusky still lingering in the locker room, the contrast Miller draws between the violence of wrestling and Ruffalo's healing caresses is extraordinary.
Carell staggers like an animal that was once injured, or perhaps never learned to walk. His du Pont seems to have been both spoiled and deprived. It's too simple to say that money has insulated him from morality; rather, it seems more probable that some flaw or defect led him to being kept as a skeleton in his family's infinitely stocked closet. Carell keeps his chin up less as a sign of breeding and more because he's always waiting for something else to catch his eye, and his voice doesn't seem to have escaped puberty unscathed. (Though this line isn't spoken verbatim, I kept hearing him say "Oh, hi Mark!") All of this could be dismissed as an impersonation—a cosmetic trick like the Roman nose—but it's all of a piece with the film's sense of surface, of touch. When Ruffalo slings his arm around Carell's shoulder, John doesn't rankle; he doesn't in any way react. That's a warning sign.
Though they're indicated to be his "rosebud," John's mommy issues are the most significant casualty of the filmmakers' method. This is disappointing, because it would have made his relationship with Mark more intelligible. Dave has his own small children to raise now, but Mark has always been his ward; their parents were shiftless, unrooted, or both. John's father remarried a tennis pro when the boy was two, leaving John to be raised by his mother, who Vanessa Redgrave plays as a mandarin ice sculpture—as self-exiled as Miss Havisham. It seems relevant that wrestling is the only one of John's many avocations that—unlike bird-watching or stamp-collecting—he doesn't refer to by its Latin name. It seems equally relevant that his mother, who does not approve of his participation in a"bloodsport," is a proud equestrian, as befits the family caste. So is he trying to impress his mother (by being, as he puts it, a leader of men) or rebel against their shared birthright?
In what is indicated to be a pivotal scene, which takes place after the old lady croaks, John releases his mother's horses from their stables. The contradiction in their relationship does not need to be resolved to resonate, but we aren't given enough to know what sense of release this act does, or should, provide for John, so the scene comes off as a fancy tableau—an image that isn't loaded with false emotion, as it might be in a more facile work, but is a misfire nonetheless. In The Master, it was a spark of freedom that drew Dodd to Freddie; is the "spark" here Mark's masculinity? Is Mark someone for John to emulate or control? John's "slumming" is thus a red herring—or at least it isn't satisfactorily accounted for. However, the ambiguity here is richer than it is in most films, and it's entered into by graceful images. In a film like Ida, you seep into the framing; here you seep into the postures, gestures, bodily cues: I admired the performers in their roles as I'd admire an athlete on his or her game. And yet, with so many of the rudiments of motivation withheld, Foxcatcher is also crucially—if artfully—malnourished.
This is at its most problematic during the climax. It may come as a surprise if you weren't aware of the full, prolix title of Mark's book, which is—spoiler alert!—Foxcatcher: The True Story of My Brother's Murder, John du Pont's Madness, and the Quest for Olympic Gold. John's substance-abuse problems are touched on in the film, but nobody would come out thinking that Dave was one of the people who tried to get John help, or that John shot Dave a good decade after Mark's training. With these facts in mind, John's motives as presented here—as they pertain to Mark—must be called into question; and while I don't think it's the critic's primary job to police fictional works on behalf of factual events, some mistruths are worthier than others. There may not be much lost on slandering a dead murderer, but the filmmakers are protected also by their reliance on implication—even if Miller's staging of the climactic scene is somewhat short on urgency.
Although I've said that Foxcatcher is a failure, that's mainly because its ambitions set the bar very high. Whiplash was a simpleminded sports movie about artists; Foxcatcher is a demanding art film about athletes. The movie is sparse, yes, but that seems an appropriate approach for dealing with unspoken tensions—with tensions that can't be spoken about. I would go so far as to say that the filmmakers' approach is a special provenance of movies as a medium, and one of the few visual storytelling styles that television has yet to replicate. And Foxcatcher is often enthralling. John's sponsorship of both USA Wrestling and his local police force—with whom he's shown at target practice on his own property—begs a question that Jimmy Savile and Bill Cosby have helped to make contemporary: Institutions must countenance the behavior of their make-or-break benefactors, but at what point do they draw the line? Predation and parasitism can be a vicious, deadly circle.
The film begins in 1987—three years after Mark (Channing Tatum) was awarded his gold medal in Los Angeles. Wherever he is now, it certainly could use that California sun; he grunts out an inspirational speech for a gray assemblage of elementary-school kids who look too tired to yawn. He trains with his brother Dave (Mark Ruffalo), a fellow Olympic gold medalist who is also a wrestling coach at a university. Between the wife, kids, job, and receding hairline, one wouldn't guess that, in real life, Dave was only a year older than Mark. There's the suggestion that Mark, affectless and laconic, is developmentally disabled—and that's off-putting because it plays into stereotypes about wrestlers, and because Mark wrote the book this movie is based on.
Discomfiting as the suggestion is, it seems to be something Mark has in common with John. Their conversation is so spare it could have been written by Hemingway. The wrestler and the wrestling enthusiast are united after Mark receives a call made on behalf of John du Pont—"of the du Pont family." He's invited to the chemical heir's Pennsylvania estate, which is draped in eternal autumn—as if to imply that it's within John's dynastic power to prevent the leaves from falling, or any cycle from completing—and invited to join Team Foxcatcher. A sententious patriot, and probably long before it was fashionable (as it would have been then; this is the Reagan era, after all), John wants to train Mark—and Mark wants to win the gold—in the interest of national prestige. John also wants Dave to join, so he too can practice next-door to the dowager du Pont's thoroughbred ranch. But Dave declines, citing family obligations: an excuse the others can't much empathize with.
Overall, as a unified work of art, Foxcatcher is a failure; and maybe, because it is a failure, it wouldn't be unfair to apply the favored epithet of those whose impatience is insulted by difficulty: pretentious. But it's an attempt to solve a problem that has always dogged movies based on true stories; this season alone, the chatter around American Sniper is exhibit A, Selma exhibit B, and The Imitation Game exhibit C. (My theory is that the current state of indignation about movie mendacity, even when positively founded, has only cropped up because "historical research" takes only a click or two more than finding a cat video.) This particular story doesn't have the high profile of the War on Terror or the Civil Rights Movement, so perhaps it's as good a test case as any. The director of Foxcatcher, Bennett Miller, is stretching his talent for supple observation into a more exploratory—even painterly—realm.
What this means is that the screenwriters (Dan Futterman and E. Max Frye) have presented the facts of the du Pont case as an outline: a skeletal outline that refuses to make the motives of the people involved sufficiently apparent. In essence, rather than lying about history, or embellishing on it, they're committing a sin of omission—and leaning more than usual on the cast to embody the sort of truths that don't come across on the page. It works and it doesn't. Sometimes it fails simply because the point of view is too narrow. Tatum, for instance, is grade-A beefcake, yet there isn't a whisper of flirtation throughout the chilly corridors of this narrative. Mark stays in ritzy hotel rooms during championships, but never strolls downstairs to the bar to enjoy the perks of his (minor) celebrity. Between him and Dave, not a single autograph is signed nor fan's hand is shaken. Even ugly-duckling John once had a short-lived marriage, but it's never brought up. On the surface, the dynamic between John and Mark parallels the allusive role confusion in The Master, but this imbalance of power overwhelms the burgeoning imbalance of passion. Miller is not a sensual filmmaker.
Of course, the elephant on the mat is wrestling itself. Any red-blooded American with any residue of world-weary irony will spot a wink of sodomy in those moves, and, more convincingly, a B.D.S.M. impulse sublimated in every headlock. But one of the chief virtues of this film is that Miller directs with clear eyes. While some elements may be too understated, nothing is ever overstated, which is the most common tendency—even in movies as good as The Wrestler. Miller believes in the audience and has faith in his cast. Whenever Tatum is in the lurch, he registers his pain with the same helpless sensitivity that makes him astute at comedy. Though they don't look like siblings, he and Ruffalo relate to each other like they are. Dave seemed, with regard to casting, less obviously within Ruffalo's range than John seemed within Carell's; hip irresponsibility was the most salient characteristic of his fair-weather father in The Kids Are All Right, and, in The Brothers Bloom, the proportions of his brotherly love were cosmic. But Dave has the admirable squareness of a person who defaults to responsibility. He isn't tough, in the traditional sense, but his physical confidence is airtight; his voice is light for a coach, so he communicates by touch. While this may sound inauspicious, with the ghost of Jerry Sandusky still lingering in the locker room, the contrast Miller draws between the violence of wrestling and Ruffalo's healing caresses is extraordinary.
Carell staggers like an animal that was once injured, or perhaps never learned to walk. His du Pont seems to have been both spoiled and deprived. It's too simple to say that money has insulated him from morality; rather, it seems more probable that some flaw or defect led him to being kept as a skeleton in his family's infinitely stocked closet. Carell keeps his chin up less as a sign of breeding and more because he's always waiting for something else to catch his eye, and his voice doesn't seem to have escaped puberty unscathed. (Though this line isn't spoken verbatim, I kept hearing him say "Oh, hi Mark!") All of this could be dismissed as an impersonation—a cosmetic trick like the Roman nose—but it's all of a piece with the film's sense of surface, of touch. When Ruffalo slings his arm around Carell's shoulder, John doesn't rankle; he doesn't in any way react. That's a warning sign.
Though they're indicated to be his "rosebud," John's mommy issues are the most significant casualty of the filmmakers' method. This is disappointing, because it would have made his relationship with Mark more intelligible. Dave has his own small children to raise now, but Mark has always been his ward; their parents were shiftless, unrooted, or both. John's father remarried a tennis pro when the boy was two, leaving John to be raised by his mother, who Vanessa Redgrave plays as a mandarin ice sculpture—as self-exiled as Miss Havisham. It seems relevant that wrestling is the only one of John's many avocations that—unlike bird-watching or stamp-collecting—he doesn't refer to by its Latin name. It seems equally relevant that his mother, who does not approve of his participation in a"bloodsport," is a proud equestrian, as befits the family caste. So is he trying to impress his mother (by being, as he puts it, a leader of men) or rebel against their shared birthright?
In what is indicated to be a pivotal scene, which takes place after the old lady croaks, John releases his mother's horses from their stables. The contradiction in their relationship does not need to be resolved to resonate, but we aren't given enough to know what sense of release this act does, or should, provide for John, so the scene comes off as a fancy tableau—an image that isn't loaded with false emotion, as it might be in a more facile work, but is a misfire nonetheless. In The Master, it was a spark of freedom that drew Dodd to Freddie; is the "spark" here Mark's masculinity? Is Mark someone for John to emulate or control? John's "slumming" is thus a red herring—or at least it isn't satisfactorily accounted for. However, the ambiguity here is richer than it is in most films, and it's entered into by graceful images. In a film like Ida, you seep into the framing; here you seep into the postures, gestures, bodily cues: I admired the performers in their roles as I'd admire an athlete on his or her game. And yet, with so many of the rudiments of motivation withheld, Foxcatcher is also crucially—if artfully—malnourished.
This is at its most problematic during the climax. It may come as a surprise if you weren't aware of the full, prolix title of Mark's book, which is—spoiler alert!—Foxcatcher: The True Story of My Brother's Murder, John du Pont's Madness, and the Quest for Olympic Gold. John's substance-abuse problems are touched on in the film, but nobody would come out thinking that Dave was one of the people who tried to get John help, or that John shot Dave a good decade after Mark's training. With these facts in mind, John's motives as presented here—as they pertain to Mark—must be called into question; and while I don't think it's the critic's primary job to police fictional works on behalf of factual events, some mistruths are worthier than others. There may not be much lost on slandering a dead murderer, but the filmmakers are protected also by their reliance on implication—even if Miller's staging of the climactic scene is somewhat short on urgency.
Although I've said that Foxcatcher is a failure, that's mainly because its ambitions set the bar very high. Whiplash was a simpleminded sports movie about artists; Foxcatcher is a demanding art film about athletes. The movie is sparse, yes, but that seems an appropriate approach for dealing with unspoken tensions—with tensions that can't be spoken about. I would go so far as to say that the filmmakers' approach is a special provenance of movies as a medium, and one of the few visual storytelling styles that television has yet to replicate. And Foxcatcher is often enthralling. John's sponsorship of both USA Wrestling and his local police force—with whom he's shown at target practice on his own property—begs a question that Jimmy Savile and Bill Cosby have helped to make contemporary: Institutions must countenance the behavior of their make-or-break benefactors, but at what point do they draw the line? Predation and parasitism can be a vicious, deadly circle.
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