'Foxcatcher': Carell brilliant as du Pont, wrestling with madness
How do you show madness? And how do you not? In Foxcatcher, the slow-burning and brilliant account of the ill-starred trajectories of multimillionaire John du Pont and Olympic champion wrestlers Dave and Mark Schultz, the thrumming portent of doom never fades. Even if you don't know the details of t
How do you show madness? And how do you not?
In Foxcatcher, the slow-burning and brilliant account of the ill-starred trajectories of multimillionaire John du Pont and Olympic champion wrestlers Dave and Mark Schultz, the thrumming portent of doom never fades. Even if you don't know the details of this real-life, late-20th-century tragedy, director Bennett Miller's masterfully observed psychological study is imbued with a sense of an inevitable, catastrophic meltdown. Like the morning mist that often enshrouds Foxcatcher Farm in the film, a vast unease hangs over the Newtown Square estate where du Pont lived and where, imagining himself a sage guru of amateur sports - and most especially of freestyle wrestling - he invited the Schultz brothers to live and train.
Like In Cold Blood, Richard Brooks' 1967 true-crime drama, Foxcatcher goes about its business with a quietude and a specificity that is eerie. (Miller's first feature, Capote, chronicled Truman Capote's struggle to report and write his book In Cold Blood, on which Brooks' film is based.) But instead of a modest family farm on the Kansas plains, the setting for Foxcatcher is a Greek Revival mansion on hundreds of rolling acres in Delaware County, where du Pont, without wife or children, tended to his concerns: collecting stamps, observing birds, and developing a wrestling team competitive with the best the Russians and Eastern Europeans could produce.
The Schultzes - Mark, played with a hulking sadness by Channing Tatum, and Dave, a sturdy, steady Mark Ruffalo - were key to du Pont's "Team Foxcatcher." Eventually, he had them both. Mark, adrift, solitary, struggling financially, came readily. Dave, married, with kids and a university coaching job, was reluctant to relocate, but by the mid-1990s he and his family were living on the estate, too.
Wait, before I go a sentence further - what about du Pont, and the actor who brings him so convincingly to life? Steve Carell, sporting an aquiline nose and a marionette's gait, and talking in halting rhythms that suggest both an air of entitlement and an impossible social awkwardness, is transformed. Carell manages to convey du Pont's isolation, his misguided sense of patriotism, the way he shrinks in the presence of his mother (Vanessa Redgrave, indelible in two fleeting scenes), and the creepy camaraderie displayed toward Mark Schultz and his teammates. There isn't a moment in Foxcatcher when Carell's du Pont doesn't appear genuine, and genuinely disconcerting.
All three actors are, in fact, mesmerizing. Tatum's portrayal of Mark, at once fiercely determined and fiercely naive, is heartbreaking. Mark lets himself be seduced by du Pont's wealth, by du Pont's dream, and, ultimately, by du Pont's insanity. The physicality of Tatum's performance, considering the subject at hand, is a given. The intensity from within, his look of ruin and loss, is something else.
Foxcatcher is a story of wealth and the lack of it, of family connection and disconnection. But more than anything, it is a story of a mind unraveling.
The result is devastating drama for those of us looking on.
Foxcatcher **** (Out of four stars)
Directed by Bennett Miller. With Steve Carell, Channing Tatum, Mark Ruffalo, Vanessa Redgrave. Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics.
Running time: 2 hours, 14 mins.
Parent's guide: R (violence, profanity, drugs, adult themes).
Playing at: Ritz East and Carmike at the Ritz Center/NJ.EndText
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