Foxcatcher - movie review: 'Steve Carell is sensational as real-life billionaire John du Pont'

Director Bennett Miller treats this quite trashy, all-American story of a loony plutocrat and the dodgy sport of wrestling with all the seriousness of a European high-art film
Prize fighter: Steve Carell, right, as du Pont, with his star wrestler, played by Channing Tatum (Picture: Fair Hill, LLC)
© Fair Hill, LLC
David Sexton22 January 2015

What is it that makes a story resonate, have meaning beyond its own facts? That's a hard question to answer and one that Foxcatcher stumbles over.

In 1996, the billionaire scion of the du Pont industrial dynasty, John Eleuthère du Pont, then in his late fifties, shot dead his friend and Olympic wrestler Dave Schultz at his Pennsylvania estate, where he had for 10 years maintained a private training camp for wrestlers, called Foxcatcher after the family racing stable.

Du Pont had aspired to take over the American Olympic wrestling team, coaching them himself and even competing as a wrestler in veteran competitions. His star protégés had been two brothers, Mark and David Schultz, who had already won gold in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and, he hoped, could do the same in Seoul in 1988. After the shooting, du Pont pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity but was found guilty of third-degree murder although mentally ill. He died in prison in 2010.

There clearly was a lot wrong with du Pont. On YouTube there's a grovelling 15-minute video of him shot in 1988 for an awards banquet celebrating his philanthropy and he is creepy as hell. In his memoir, Foxcatcher: A True Story of Murder, Madness and the Quest for Olympic Gold, Mark Schultz, the surviving younger brother, describes his repugnance on first meeting him: “My gut reaction was a feeling of revulsion.” But he needed du Pont’s money and didn’t walk away.

It is this story that the director Bennett Miller, known for his previous real-life movies Capote and Moneyball, has chosen to tell with all the gravity and fidelity he can muster. Foxcatcher treats this quite trashy, all-American story of a loony plutocrat and the dodgy sport of wrestling with all the seriousness of a European high-art film. It is, in many ways, beautifully made, giving its scenes the time to unfold, holding its shots patiently, showing, not telling. And the performances live up to this approach.

As du Pont, Steve Carell is extraordinary. Wearing a huge prosthetic nose, Carell holds his head back to keep it in the air and he has his mouth perpetually half-open as if he can only breathe that way. He’s stiff — he turns his whole body, never just his head — and his eyes are dead and withdrawn: there’s an absence there. And he talks in a badly stressed monotone, in a way that conveys simultaneous insecurity and arrogance. He is not played for laughs, though. There’s one funny moment, when he tells Dave Schultz that he doesn’t need to address him formally any more — “most of my friends will call me Eagle or Golden Eagle”. But he has no friends and he really is, with that great beak and stalking posture, a strange, nasty bird.

Mark Ruffalo, always so irresistibly likeable, plays Dave Schultz — much cleverer than the brawnier Mark — very winningly, and Channing Tatum is wholly credible as a hulking wrestler, stomping around with bowed legs and his arms held away from his body to accommodate the muscle, his jaw protruding toughly.

Moreover, as we know from 22 Jump Street, Tatum is brilliant at playing stupid — and Mark, so quick on the mat, is slow on the uptake in every other way.

Alas, it appears that the real Mark is none too quick either, since it was only when reviewers started to point out the homoerotic element of the tussles between him and du Pont that he objected to the film. Yet these bouts are torrid enough — and he himself in his book alleges that the reason du Pont shot his brother was as a sick birthday gift to a Bulgarian wrestler with whom he was infatuated. That explanation of the killing doesn’t appear in the film, which leaves the murder largely unexplained, other than as a result of du Pont’s mental illness and perhaps the jealousy he feels at Dave’s influence over Mark, who never equivalently respected du Pont.

Vanessa Redgrave contributes a chilling cameo as du Pont’s repressive, derisive mother — “I don’t like the sport of wrestling, as you know. It is a low sport, I don’t like to see you being low,” she tells him — but as Dave Schultz’s wife, Sienna Miller has little to add. It’s a man’s film and perhaps will speak most to men particularly intrigued, for whatever reason, by sweaty, near-naked tussles between heterosexual men. For all other viewers it becomes dull: too long, too slow, not reaching out to other lives, other stories, lacking in resonance.

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