I saw Foxcatcher this past weekend, and I would now like to present a few spoiler-filled rants about the film.
1. The accolades miss some incredible performances.
All the buzz is about Steve Carrell who portrays John du Pont as perhaps the quintessential “eccentric, lonely rich guy,” surrounded by toadies but devoid of any friends. We’ve already seen Carrell’s potential to play both a serious and villainous character in 2013’s underrated The Way Way Back, but here he is literally transformed into a sort of monster. He absolutely deserves the accolades.
Mark Ruffalo is incredible as wrestler Dave Schultz. I never would’ve thought of Ruffalo playing a world-class athlete. I don’t mean that as a slight, but rather that his roles, even as the Incredible Hulk, tend to be more cerebral than physical. Here, though, he adopts all of the physicality and mannerisms of a lifelong wrestler, while still showing incredible depth and complexity. The scene where he is asked to say into the camera, for a du Pont-funded documentary, that John du Pont is his “mentor,” is utterly brilliant. Both he and Carrell deserve the Oscar nominations and praise they have received.
I dare say, however, that Channing Tatum deserves more praise than he has received, but that the structure of the final act of the film did him no favors. The movie begins with him as the central character (something I’ll get to more in a moment), but by the end he has largely faded from view without much explanation (I’ll get to that, too.) Carrell or Ruffalo essentially played characters frozen in time, with Tatum’s character responding and adapting to his circumstances. Again, this is not to take anything away from those two phenomenal performances, but Tatum came closest to the archetypal “hero’s journey.” He offers an amazing display of the pressure that star athletes feel, much of which they put on themselves. He embodies the physicality of the sport even more than Ruffalo, although I don’t know if that was too much or not. Sometimes it seems like Hollywood wants to typecast him as the “handsome guy who can act,” but this movie allowed him to do more than that.
2. The film is interesting, but once you realize what it is actually about, it is frustrating and disappointing.
If you don’t know the true story behind the movie (which I did not), the final act will come as a huge surprise. A substantial portion of the theater where I saw it obviously had no idea what was coming, and while the movie foreshadows the crap out of it, the first half (at least) seems to be setting up a very different type of movie.
The movie began as what seemed to be a story of a down-on-his-luck wrestler who won Olympic gold but is now struggling to make ends meet, who gets the opportunity to train under a fantastically wealthy, if strange and clueless, benefactor. Mark Schultz tries to get his brother and training partner, Dave, to come with him to train at du Pont’s Foxcatcher Farms estate in Pennsylvania, but Dave doesn’t want to uproot his family. This begins a story of a professional relationship between Mark and du Pont that turns into friendship, and then veers into self-destructive drug use for reasons that are not quite made clear.
My point being that this is not at all what the movie is ultimately about. Wikipedia calls it a “biographical true crime drama film,” which I would not have guessed from the first half of the movie. I fully expected du Pont to do something crazy, but the murder of Dave Schultz seems to come out of nowhere, and all the time spent on the relationship between du Pont and Mark suddenly seems like a red herring. That’s not always a bad thing in a film, but this is a biopic, not The Usual Suspects.
I’ve seen both of director Bennett Miller s other feature films, and I found that they also failed to answer some of the biggest questions raised by their subject matter. It just seemed especially pronounced in Foxcatcher. I like the way film critic Budd Wilkins put it:
As a consequence of Miller’s relentless de-dramatization, Foxcatcher offers us next to nothing of utility or complexity about du Pont’s pathology, beyond a mother fixation that would make Norman Bates blush and a high-caliber fascination with firearms, which, after all, is how the du Pont clan first acquired their filthy lucre, as the VHS tape du Pont encourages Mark to watch so brazenly trumpets.
3. The filmmakers obviously had a great deal more material, and they obviously had a hard time making cuts.
The story of Dave Schultz’s murder by John du Pont obviously needed a great deal of set-up but the film seemed to introduce numerous unexplored themes and plot points. It seemed like they filmed enough material to make a miniseries, judging by the number of issues left dangling, but had to trim it to feature-film length. Just a few off the top of my head:
– The horses being “off-limits.”
– Giving Mrs. du Pont her “privacy,” followed by the scene where Mark is watching her with the field glasses.
– The late-night wrestling between Mark Schultz and du Pont.
– The impromptu coaching session du Pont starts when his mother enters the gym, and abruptly ends when he notices that she left.
– All the police cars with their siren lights on. (I though maybe it would turn out that du Pont had been under investigation for something all along. It turns out he was a big supporter of local police, which meant he got to ride around in patrol cars now and then.)
– The unexplained importance of the 50-caliber machine gun, other than to clumsily showcase du Pont’s potential for violence.
4. Mark Schultz’s falling-out with du Pont is not explored at all.
It seemed inevitable, given the way Carrell portrayed du Pont, that he would eventually lash out at Mark, specifically by slapping him. They never explore further though, how this one incident soured Mark forever. It’s not like Mark hadn’t seen du Pont’s potential for cruelty. This aspect of the film felt incomplete.
5. It is not at all clear that eight years elapse between Mark’s departure from Foxcatcher Farms and Dave’s murder.
After the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, the movie zips through eight years of life at Foxcatcher Farms to get to 1996, when du Pont killed Dave Schultz. I had to read about the case to know that, although maybe I missed somethingh on screen indicating the year.
6. They missed an opportunity to show du Pont’s “descent into madness” or whatever.
Aside from the “changes in security” scene at the gate, nothing really indicates that du Pont was appreciably more paranoid or erratic than he had been before by the time 1996 rolls around. Dave Schultz conrtinues to live at Foxcatcher Farms with his family and train with du Pont, but the only interaction we see between them during this time is Dave telling du Pont that Sunday is “family time.” According to Wikipedia, this is meant to show that “[d]u Pont is bewildered by [Dave’s] devotion to his family and independence from his control.” The next time we see du Pont, as best I can recall, a viewing of the old documentary video, the one where Dave couldn’t bring himself to call du Pont a “mentor,” leads directly to the murder.
7. They missed an opportunity to show a 48-hour standoff between du Pont and police.
After shooting Dave, du Pont spent 48 hours holed up in his house. A New York Times article published a few weeks later describes what happened:
Last weekend…members of a team of hostage negotiators asked themselves how the millionaire, with his large stock of firearms, could be lured into giving up peacefully.
The key, they agreed was to “make him think he’s a winner and he’s in charge,” said [retired FBI agent and negotiator Thomas] Cupples.
They secretly cut off the heat to the house, then on Sunday, after 48 hours of stand-off, they offered to check on the heating system.
“‘I don’t need that,'” Mr. Cupples quoted Mr. du Pont as saying moments before he was captured by authorities. “‘I’ll turn the heat on myself,'” Mr. du Pont said. “‘I know where it is and I can do it.’”
Police officers got him when he went outside. The lead-up to that could have been some great cinema.
8. I don’t understand how the movie got made at all.
Again, the performances are incredible, but I’m having a hard time understandinf esxactly what story the filmmakers wanted to tell. Is it a story of an Olympic wrestler’s fall from glory? A story about the different fates of two brothers? Or is it about an eccentric millionaire who didn’t get away with murder? At the end of the day, it mostly seems like a vehicle for Oscar nominations.
