Foxcatcher

I am sufficiently out of it that I had no idea that a film was made of John E. du Pont's murder of wrestler David Schultz until today. While Olivia went to go see Into the Woods and her mother watched the baby, I saw and was thrilled by Foxcatcher.

Channing Tatum is Mark Schultz, a 1984 Olympic gold medalist reduced to giving talks to elementary school assemblies for twenty bucks a pop, and lives in a dumpy efficiency apartment. Ultra-creepy du Pont, in an Oscar-caliber performance by Steve Carell, has a fascination with wrestling and the money to get whatever he wants...plus just enough family pedigree to believe that he is Doing Something Important For America, as had generations for his warmonger polluter family before him.

Mark is set up with a $25,000 salary--the highest number he could think of, he tells brother David--and is treated like a prize stallion...du Pont's mother keeps and trains those at Foxcatcher. The poor kid even has to train du Pont in wrestling basics, and call him "coach" or sometimes "Eagle", which du Pont claims his friends call him.

John is insane, a cocaine user, a bit of a gun nut, and played with a really bizarre and quiet intensity by Carell. If the movie has a flaw, it's that it doesn't trust Carell, so we get a few too many interstitial scenes of him acting kooky. Really, we know it from the very first sentence he speaks, even if the naïf Schultz is clueless.

David Schultz, probably the best freestyle wrestler of the second half of the twentieth century, is Mark's more together older brother. He's played by Mark Ruffalo, who really inhabits the role, including the little easy-limbed hunch Schultz walked with. He resists du Pont's overtures at first, and du Pont puts the pressure on Mark, even slapping him across the face. (This got an audible ooooh from the audience here in Pennsylvania--about forty miles from the real Foxcatcher Farm.) Finally, David shows up to coach...or be the assistant coach under the incompetent beginner du Pont.

The rest is history, literally. Schultz disappoints du Pont by not winning gold at the Seoul Olympics-a knee injury hindered him in real life, but the movie suggests a purely psychological cause--and then he left Foxcatcher Farm permanently. David continued on coaching du Pont's private Foxcatcher team...and then in a slowly simmering fit, du Pont shoots David Schultz three times, killing him. The film does a great job with the moment, basically underplaying it. There's no swelling music, no slow-mo, it's just a causal murder by a rich old maniac who has tired of his toy.

Foxcatcher is a well-done film. The wrestling looks good, Carell refuses to chew the scenery, and Tatum's prosthetic cauliflower ears are perfect. The movie plays with time and space, like any other fictionalized version of real events (e.g., du Pont only built the wrestling facility after his mother's death; it took du Pont two days to surrender in real life, not so in the film) but is super accomplished and respectful. A couple of scenes which feature du Pont and his mother are probably just guesswork or hearsay, but still ring true.

Watch this movie. I see Supporting Actor Oscar nominations for it.