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.
