Foxcatcher

If there is a moral to Bennett Miller's morose and plodding Foxcatcher (2013), it's this -- If someone says to you "my friends call me 'Eagle' or 'Golden Eagle'," you should run like hell in the other direction.  This is what Foxcatcher's crazy protagonist, the beak-nosed John Du Pont, says to his wrestling protégé, the Olympic gold medalist, Mark Schultz.  Schultz merely nods and remains with the madman, seduced apparently by the billionaire's treasure, although Mark Schultz, played by Tatum Channing in a grimly taciturn and uncommunicative way, is too doltish to provide us with any evidence of his motives.  Miller's film tells a simple enough story and one that is largely true, at least in outline.  In 1986 or 1987. John Du Pont, a middle-aged ornithologist and Olympic wrestling fan and, also, the heir to the DuPont chemical  fortune, tried to recruit to Olympic quality Greco-Roman wrestlers, Mark and David Schultz, to coach a team of wrestlers that he was assembling for international competition.  Mark, the younger and more stupid of the two brothers, initially joined Du Pont on his estate near Philadelphia where he lived lavishly as the guest of the eccentric plutocrat.  Later, his older and smarter brother Dave, joined the team, displacing Mark in Du Pont's affections.  Inexplicably, John Du Pont murdered Dave, gunning him down outside the guest house where he was staying on the Du Pont estate.  (According to Wikipedia, Du Pont's family paid Dave's widow 35 million dollars, a fact that demonstrates that if you are going to be killed by a lunatic, it's best to die at the hands of a billionaire.)  Closing credits tells us that Du Pont was acquitted of murder on the basis of insanity but died in custody in any event in 2010.  This story seems pregnant with meaning, an eerie fable of some kind -- perhaps, a parable about how amateur athletics can be infected by money, or an indictment of violence -- the film shows the fake violence of pro-wrestling, the real violence of mixed martial arts exhibitions fought in grungy cages, and the carefully supervised violence of Olympic Greco-Roman wrestling. But the director of the film, Bennett Miller, focuses on the characters to the exclusion of thematic elements and, as a result, the movie lacks focus -- Miller can't find the center of the picture.  (And this is a literal critique:  at first, the movie seems to focus on the dim-witted younger brother, Mark; then, we are given a portrait of John E. Du Pont in the most clichéd terms -- the poor little rich boy, unloved by his mother, and buying friends with his fortune.  Then, Mark is exiled from the picture and the picture's last quarter shifts to his relationship with Du Pont -- this part of the film, ending in the shooting, seems rushed and inadequately developed.  But the viewer is perplexed:  who is the film supposed to be about?)  Miller's focus on the characters involved in the story turns out to be a fatal error -- none of the characters is sufficiently interesting to support the movie.  Tatum Channing's Mark Schultz is a lumbering, uncommunicative dolt -- he is so dense that he can barely speak and spends the entire movie sulking, looking at the world with complete, moronic incomprehension.  You can't build a movie on a character this resolutely stupid.  Steve Carrell's performance as John Du Pont is also eccentric to the point of destroying the film:  most actors would use the opportunity of playing a mad man for some flamboyant over-the-top theatrics.  Carrell, unrecognizable in the make-up creating Du Pont's Cyrano de Bergerac nose, takes the opposite tack -- he underplays, turning Du Pont into a zombie.  (He is similar to another bizarre "poor little rich boy", the semi-comatose governor of Minnesota, Mark Dayton.)  Carrell speaks all of his lines with a peculiar, rambling, stammering prosody -- he talks very, very slowly and pauses in the middle of phrases where we would not expect a pause.  The result is that every speech made by Du Pont stalls the movie, slowing it to a crawl.  And half of the movie is Du Pont talking to people.  This is a madman who never ever says anything interesting -- the poor little rich boy is played as a loathsome aberrant bore, the kind of person so crushingly dull that no one can stand to be in his presence.  But, of course, this is an enormous problem for a film:  Tatum Channing and Carrell are both stiff, taciturn, almost incapable of any kind of speech and they are together, interacting (or failing to interact), for most of the film.  I don't doubt the veracity of these performances -- perhaps, Du Pont was as autistic and comatose as the film suggests and, perhaps, Mark Schultz was every bit the big galoot-fool that the movie portrays.  But you can't have two stiffs as your leading men in a film; it just doesn't work dramatically.  Mark Ruffalo as the smarter brother is more engaging and seems to have something like a normal life.  But this makes it all the more strange and improbable that he would fall for Du Pont's seduction -- the movie doesn't probe his motives and verges on hagiography with respect to the way that Dave is portrayed.  And the film provides absolutely no motivation for the killing.  Suddenly, the picture just takes a turn toward the homicide -- Mark is gone, Du pont goes to Dave's house and without a word of explanation, or a single expository shot, guns the older brother down.  Thus, the film ends on a wholly inexplicable note.  I have the sense that legal considerations may have neutered this picture.  After all, Dave's estate has 35 million dollars and it would be improvident to anger people with those resources.  Furthermore, the movie is completely dishonest in its suppression of the actual chronology of events.  In reality, Du Pont hired Mark to coach his wrestling team in 1987.  Dave joined in 1988 and Mark went to Utah or some other place to coach a college team.  DuPont gradually lost interest in his lavishly funded wrestling team and shot Dave in 1996 -- that is eight years later.  In the film, it seems that Dave is killed the same year that Mark departs the Foxcatcher team (the wrestling team and film are named for one of DuPont's estates where the training facilities were located.)  So we have a film that shows Mark and Du Pont interacting for three-quarters of the narrative.  Yet, in reality, Mark was with Du Pont for only two years -- Dave worked for DuPont for more than eight years before he was killed by his patron.  There is a kernel of interesting story in this material, but one that Bennett Miller doesn't dare to develop:  apparently, the older, more practical brother thought that he could exploit the eccentric billionaire and, indeed, successfully did so until Du Pont became disenchanted with him and took revenge.  The nature of the relationship between the older brother, Dave, and Du Pont is never explored -- what, in fact, was going on between them?  The film has a nice opening scene showing the two brothers sparring -- they are like big, half-brutal half-loving bears batting at one another and the depth of their affection his effectively shown in this scene.  But the movie is so lugubrious and melancholy, the characters so dull and inexpressive, that the film seems blurry -- you can't figure out what it's supposed to be about.  And when Dave is shot down in the snow, your only reaction is "Really?"