Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher, which nervily pitches the stars of 21 Jump Street and The 40-Year-Old Virgin four-square at the Oscar voters, features so much admirable acting, writing and film-making that I wonder why it left me so unmoved.
The film details events leading up to the murder, by the immensely wealthy chemicals-dynasty heir John E du Pont (Steve Carell), of Olympic wrestling gold medallist Dave Schultz (Mark Ruffalo) in 1996. Having built a sumptuous pro-wrestling training camp overlooking the site of George Washington’s Valley Forge encampment in Pennsylvania, and having peopled it, by 1987, with contenders for Seoul 1988, including Dave’s younger brother Mark (Channing Tatum), the increasingly unstable Du Pont evidently believed that his riches entitled him almost to purchase Mark as a surrogate son, and his escalating irrationality seems to have persuaded him that Dave stood in the way of that.
On the admirable side, we find exceptional performances by the three leads. Much has been made of Carell’s performance behind a prosthetic face but I find the makeup, like an adopted accent, cramps the actor somewhat. That said, his Du Pont, all vertiginously unsettling pauses (“It’s the canary in the coalmine … do you bird-watch?”) and crippling social awkwardness, is still a semi-marvel. I also admired the screenplay’s complex interplay between self-made working-class men trapped in a dynast’s playground, between ardent American super-patriots aping the steeplechasing pursuits of the former colonial oppressor and their kept men in the wrestling barn. The production design echoes this throughout, with emblems of the American revolution everywhere. The family’s snobbery about history and dynastic endurance, of course, fails to acknowledge that “the low sport” of wrestling – so called by Du Pont’s mother (Vanessa Redgrave), a horsey devotee of “the sport of kings” – is as old as mankind: Zeus got to be Zeus in a wrestling bout, after all.
The movie uses some dodgy temporal sleight-of-hand to include, as integral to the main story, a murder that occurred fully eight years after the main body of events. This, and the movie’s very deliberate pacing, its “serious” running time of 134 minutes and its general ambience of perhaps having been abandoned by Steven Soderbergh (like Bennett’s Moneyball before it) ate away at my experience of Foxcatcher.
As did the feeling that Annapurna producer Megan Ellison has established a rival Oscar-bait factory to the Weinstein machine. There is a gigantic empty gap today between movies that cost under five million bucks and those that cost over 100 million. Surely there are more than two outfits in Hollywood seeking to fill that space.
