Take a shot every time someone in Foxcatcher mentions America or waves the flag, and you're bound to salute from the floor. A lurid true-crime incident given a dour, muted treatment, the movie means to pin the American obsession with vigor and success to the mat, and the very last scene features wrestling fans chanting "U.S.A.! U.S.A.!" For a film whose script is elliptical in some ways, it's not ashamed to stick its themes in your face.
There are other ways Bennett Miller's film doesn't trust the spectator to make up his or her own mind. As eccentric millionaire John du Pont, Steve Carell sports a prosthetic nose and speaks in a fey wheeze — gambits intended to distance him from his typical comic roles, if not send up a signal to Oscar voters. But at the end of the day, his work on The Daily Show and the early seasons of The Office was more genuinely serious and thoughtful than this muddled film.Â
Foxcatcher is "based on a true story," which means it gives itself license to bend the time frame of those events. Wrestler Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum) leads a humdrum existence after winning an Olympic gold medal. He practices, occasionally speaks to audiences of schoolkids and comes home to eat ramen. His brother Dave (Mark Ruffalo), also an Olympic champ, works as a wrestling coach.
Carell's du Pont gets in touch with Mark and offers to finance another Olympic bid in 1988, paying the team's salaries and housing them on the palatial grounds of his Foxcatcher Farm. What he really wants, though, is to work with Dave, a family man who doesn't want to relocate to rural Pennsylvania. Eventually, the millionaire gets his wish — but when Dave moves in, Mark becomes increasingly unhappy with du Pont.
Tatum's and Ruffalo's performances are actually far more impressive than Carell's. In an intensely physical turn, Tatum remains almost entirely silent, to the point one wonders about Mark's intelligence: He does everything du Pont tells him to, including snorting cocaine, only to get fed up. Sulking and seething, Tatum does most of his acting through his body. Dave is the only member of the trio — there are only three fully developed characters in the film — who seems like an ordinary guy unplagued by major demons, something perhaps Ruffalo alone among contemporary actors can make compelling.Â
Carell, on the other hand, overdoes du Pont's freakishness. He mentions a "Mrs. du Pont" once, but he must be referring to his mother. (In real life, he was married to a woman for 45 days.) The movie makes him out to be a raging closet case whose interest in wrestling lies in ogling and manipulating male bodies while hiding behind the glory of being a mentor to young men. In a brief scene, he pins Mark to the floor; as shot, the scene looks like the beginning of a rape, even if the script doesn't spell this out and Miller cuts away quickly. In any case, this period in their lives leads to Mark and John's relationship turning sour, as Mark and Dave's sibling rivalry escalates.Â
The 134-minute film is paced slowly but steadily: I looked at my watch thinking that an hour passed, but it was almost over. Yet Miller and screenwriters Dan Futterman and E. Max Frye don't seem particularly interested in wrestling as a sport, just as a pretext to mount a glum reverie about the death of the American dream, as it plays out for John and Mark — if that's indeed what Foxcatcher is about. It insinuates a lot about those ideals and their decline, but it doesn't have anything clear to say about them.
You can see equally tawdry true-crime dramas all day long on cable TV, and their directors don't take 134 minutes or use a showily desaturated palette to tell them. Robert Greene's documentary Fake It So Real, about a troupe of amateur wrestlers in North Carolina, has far more to say about both that sport and our country. In the end, America slips out of Foxcatcher's hold.
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