Bennett Miller’s horribly magnificent Foxcatcher is based on the true story of John E Du Pont, the bizarre, petulant billionaire who took it upon himself to mentor the US Olympic wrestling team in the runup to the 1988 Seoul Games, and created a state-of-the-art training facility for them at his palatial family home, Foxcatcher Farm. For this poignantly lonely and talentless plutocrat, his “Team Foxcatcher” was to be a macho version of Marie Antoinette’s Le Petit Trianon, where Du Pont could pretend to be a popular sports guy, like Antoinette dressing as a shepherdess.
We see Du Pont hiring Mark Schultz, a gold medallist at the Summer Olympics in LA four years earlier, but considered inferior to his elder brother and fellow gold medallist, Dave Schultz. Does Du Pont genuinely empathise with poor Mark, who has been one of life’s second bananas and is deeply moved and grateful for this chance? OrdoesDu Pont, with the bully’s natural cunning, find Mark easier to push around and see in Mark a convenient bait to get Dave on the payroll? The toxicity of this psychological situation is overwhelming, and the inevitability of disaster stomach-turning.
The cast give career-best performances. Steve Carell plays DuPont with chilling conviction. He isa spoilt brat who is given to spouting business-speak cliches about the vital importance of “leadership”, but is dominated by his elderly mother, played by Vanessa Redgrave. Carell’s Du Pont arguably has a grain of Michael Scott, the Brentesque manager in the US version of Ricky Gervais’s The Office, along with theCaligula that John Hurt played in I,Claudius. But the performance is eerily still and calm, unshowy and unnerving, somehow intimidating and ridiculous at the same time, and rarely overtly comic, except when he graciously encourages Mark to call him by his nicknames “Eagle” or “Golden Eagle”.
Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo, as Mark and Dave, have outdone themselves. These actors give what seems to me the most compelling portrayal of brothers since Joe Pesci and Robert De Niro in Scorsese’s Raging Bull. Mark’s fury in his hotel room at losing a wrestling bout, smashing his head against the mirror and then eating himself into a stupor, surely must have been inspired by DeNiro’s Jake LaMotta. Yet there’s a heartbreakingly redemptive outcome to that episode, a moment of fraternal tenderness that Jake never had.
When I first saw Foxcatcher at its Cannes premiere last year, it seemed like a compelling study of the secret fear and horror of coming second – a tragicomedy of the beta male. On a second viewing, the tragic dimension comes through more strongly. The relationship between the brothers is fraught: Daveis genuinely concerned and protective about his prickly, defensive brother, who treats Dave with hero-worshipping love but also resentment. The two boys need a loving father figure to heal their wounds; what they get is Du Pont, a poisonous destroyer. Foxcatcher is a superb, satiric antithesis of a Hollywood underdog sports movie, in which plucky David always beats Goliath and somehow, even in the euphoria of triumph, retains the little guy’s glowing moral superiority. There is nothing of that here, although as in his previous film, Moneyball (2011), Miller has a connoisseur’s eye for the arenas and corporate spaces of American sport.
Wrestling itself is an absorbing, obviously metaphorical contest. It is anunerotic clinch, yet as intimate as dancing. In an early encounter during training, Mark is furious with himself for being beaten by Dave and accidentally-on-purpose butts him in the face. Dave wipes away the blood and carries on. He doesn’t say anything, and Ruffalo and Tatum show how his manly reticence and forgiveness make Mark’s shame and defeat worse.
As the story unfolds, this lethal emotional triangle pulsates with poison. The vulnerability and sadness in Tatum’s Mark turns to anger; Ruffalo’s smart, professional Dave is clenched with shame at becoming a serf on the Du Pont estate; and Carell’s pathetic delusions of leadership coagulate into violent resentment.
What finally emerges is something rarely acknowledged in Hollywood cinema: the gruesome reality of classdivision and class hatred. The usual ethos of sports movies is meritocratic – you can be all you can be on the football field or the running track. That is not what emerges from Foxcatcher, which is far bleaker and crueller about modern America. Millerbrilliantly creates the sheer physical discomfort Mark feels in Du Pont’s grand house. Yet in the end it is DuPont who hates the Schultz brothers, not the other way around. Foxcatcher is thrilling, disturbing and desperately sad.
