"I'll just get my gear."




So Carrell’s been getting all the attention, but really Tatum as Mark is the lead, and he wears cauliflower ears and fakes an underbite, so throw him some nominations too, you knuckleheads. It’s not just noses that are acting, ears and chins also count. He’s brawny and inarticulate (kind of like FIGHTING, which I ought to watch again, that was a good one) but what’s different from most of his roles is how weak-minded he is. He’s unsure of himself and desperate to get out from under his brother’s shadow. He’s pathetically jealous of Dave (Mark Ruffalo)’s wife and kids when they’re more important to him than wrestling, and of Dave himself when du Pont brings him in to train the team that Mark built. Mark is very loyal to du Pont, and du Pont is very much the opposite. Like Bret the Hitman Hart and Vince McMahon in WRESTLING WITH SHADOWS. That’s a different type of wrestling, though.

mp_foxcatcherRuffalo is great in this role, and without being as big and bulky as the real guy manages to capture a real manly physicality that contrasts a gentle, calming personality. I never think of Ruffalo as much of a tough guy, even when he’s playing a Dirty Harry-like cop or an actual super hero, but here he does it. He carries himself like a wrestler and even while in conversation seems to have his hands ready to grasp and control anything that comes toward him. In fact, he often does put his hands on people, because that’s his art. He would also be good at pottery, I bet.

This movie definitely has a respect for this ancient and somewhat marginalized sport, and even takes a moment to show the wrestlers notice when they’re being overshadowed by MMA. In one (historically inaccurate) scene Mark and teammates are huddled in a little apartment watching an early Ultimate Fighting Championship. I like the idea of these highly trained Olympians trying to decide what to think about a guy in a cage getting his face smashed to a bloody pulp by an elbow. Without an insane rich guy funding them wouldn’t they be looking for work like this? Mark seems to respect it, others want to stay pretty.

The footage they’re watching is actually UFC 8, which happened several years later. The elbow is Gary Goodridge, the face is Paul Herrera. This is when it was still a tournament, and Goodridge later tapped out to Don Frye, the awesome mustache guy in GODZILLA FINAL WARS. (thank you Victor Morton for the correction.) I think the reason they chose to show that one is that just four months after his brother’s murder the real Mark Schultz fought Goodridge in UFC 9. It wasn’t an intentional career move – he was a last minute substitute for David Beniteau, who he’d been training, and who had broken his hand. Schultz won by TKO (because a cut on Goodridge’s head wouldn’t stop bleeding) and considered it redemption for his wrestling losses. That was his only professional MMA fight.

A little sports trivia for you there. This isn’t really a sports movie though, you’re not supposed to be too invested in them winning matches. It’s more about the dynamic between these three dudes, the wrestling brothers and the weirdo multi-millionaire in the track suit. And it’s also about the adventure of a simple dude being a guest in the alien world of the super-rich. He comes to take this job he was offered and the staff acts confused why he’s even there. Du Pont has servants but also guys that might be described as henchmen. Grizzled fixer type guys who could be his bodyguards or his people who hand out envelopes stuffed with cash. One of them is played by Anthony Michael Hall, who in my opinion has gotten alot more intimidating than when he was a kid.

Nobody at this Foxcatcher place knows how to have normal human relations. One guy quizzes Mark on his parents’ relationship. du Pont asks him if he likes birdwatching – does he look like a fucking birdwatcher to you? They show him his new home and hand him a VHS tape on “the history of the du Pont Dynasty.” He gets a severe warning that the horse stables belong to du Pont’s mother and are “off limits.” What exactly are they worried he’s gonna do?

In a way this is a story about American aristocracy. Somebody in a previous generation of this family made a ton of money selling weapons and chemicals, so this nutball is born rich and can do whatever the fuck he wants to do instead of work. Some rich people take advantage of this to build the Spruce Goose, produce Paul Thomas Anderson movies or animate THE BOXTROLLS. Eccentric, fun things that could improve the world. This guy is sometimes more on the scary side. For example he, uh, buys a tank.  Some army guys come to deliver it, have him sign off on it. He brings Mark with him and looks it over and – forget that he’s an asshole to them because it doesn’t have the machine gun he wants – the crazy thing is that everybody acts like it makes sense to bring a tank to this guy’s house. Hey, he’s rich and he wants a tank. So he gets a tank.

(Wait a minute, I thought. Do I know about this? Was there some news story about a rich guy going on a tank rampage?)

We also see him training with police on his shooting range, and hear implications of them coming to him for tactical expertise or something. I wonder if he also appraises samurai swords? It seems like actually has no background in combat or law enforcement, but he does have a gun range and guns and stuff, so everybody acts as if it makes sense.

That’s what it is, it’s all about acting as if. When Mark first gets a call to come meet with du Pont, the voice on the line keeps telling him about “John E. du Pont, of the du Ponts,” like Mark should know who that is and be in awe. Because he’s from a rich family. And Mark, being a normal guy not from one of the richest families in America, is expected to be willing to drop everything and fly to this guy’s place to talk to him without any indication of what they’re going to talk about. And he does.

Mark buys the whole thing. He gets upset because du Pont is “an important man” and his sister-in-law (Sienna Miller, GI JOE AND THE  RISE OF COBRA) says hi to him like a normal person instead of, I don’t know, curtsying or something. Why is du Pont an important man? Because he wrote a book about birds one time? You telling me you treat all ornithologists like kings?

Du Pont introduces himself as a wrestling coach, but there’s no evidence that he’s anything of the sort. For some reason that’s his fantasy, and his staff plays along. Mostly he walks around the gym while the wrestlers practice, looking thoughtful. Nobody cares, because he seems nice enough, and he put a roof over their heads. But it gets real uncomfortable when he starts pretending like he’s the actual coach. In real life du Pont opened his wrestling facility after his mother’s death, but it’s worth fudging that in the movie for the scene where mom (Vanessa Redgrave), who disapproves of wrestling because it’s “low,” gets wheeled in during a practice. Du Pont makes the wrestlers stop and take a knee while he makes a ridiculous speech and then demonstrates beginning wrestling moves to Olympians. There’s definitely a sense of “what the fuck is he doing?”, but the wrestlers, especially Dave, seem to feel sorry for him and play along.

It’s harder to just go with it when du Pont hires a crew to make a documentary about what an awesome coach he is. This was real. “Doc,” the guy who interviews Dave in the movie is the real guy, he acted as a consultant on FOXCATCHER and let them use all his raw footage as reference. This is another point where they sort of dampen the comedy. It could easily play as a hilarious Danny McBride scene, but they only allow it to be as funny as the real video. Hard not to laugh a little, but also you can sense that this is trouble, this guy’s delusions are getting dangerous.

END SPOILERS TO BE DISCUSSED THIS PARAGRAPH. One really depressing thing about the story as presented in the movie is that Dave is killed for his ability to stand up for himself. Mark allows himself to become du Pont’s GI Joe doll. He flies to him, works for cheap, even goes through a brief, unfortunate cocaine/frosted tips/leather jacket period to be du Pont’s sidekick, his Kaeto Kaehlin. Dave is shown consistently making reasonable demands for himself. He won’t take the job until he can bring his family with him, he insists on having one day a week with them, he makes sure Mark is taken care of after leaving. In real life I don’t think anybody ever figured out why du Pont (who thought Nazis were conspiring against him and that his treadmills were time machines) killed Dave, but in the movie it seems to be that he can’t control him enough. It just infuriates him. I am an important man! I am the Golden Eagle! I will come over to your house on Sunday if I want to!

Director Bennett Miller previously did CAPOTE and MONEYBALL, so this is a triple whammy for that guy. (I’m not counting his documentary THE CRUISE, because the whiny tour guide philosopher guy it’s about was so fingernails-on-a-chalkboard annoying in WAKING LIFE that I consider any movie with him in it to be lost.)

This subject was literally handed to Miller in an envelope at a DVD signing. A guy gave him newspaper clippings and said it would make a good movie for him. He agreed and became obsessed. It’s been in the works so long that at one point he wanted Heath Ledger to star in it. When he chose Tatum it was on the basis of A GUIDE TO RECOGNIZING YOUR SAINTS. Not even STEP UP.

After all that time he’s made something that steers away from some of the more lurid aspects (there’s only brief hints of a possible gay crush or of the 48 hour police standoff before du Pont’s arrest) and somehow is all the more fascinating for it. I like this one. Consider me Team Foxcatcher.

Wait, no.

further information:

Miller told Keith Phipps of The Dissolve that he considered including the fact that du Pont was buried in his Team Foxcatcher singlet.

Slate has a good write up about what the movie changed from the real story.

The Daily Mail tells us that even before Dave’s murder Mark had a plan to sell all his things, hide in the bushes outside of du Pont’s mansion, shoot him in the head with a crossbow and and move to Brazil and start a family. “He ultimately decided against the plan,” it says. Then at the end of the article Schultz says some surprisingly sympathetic things about du Pont.

Doc’s documentaries depicted in the movie (one called “Quest For the Best” aired on the Discovery Channel) aren’t on Youtube, but here’s a puff piece somebody else made about du Pont for an awards banquet:

This entry was posted on Monday, December 29th, 2014 at 1:24 pm and is filed under Drama, Reviews, Sport. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

12 Responses to “Foxcatcher”

  1. I believe Olympic gold medalist and all time pro wrestling great Kurt Angel was around for the events of this movie and offered to consult with the film makers and they declined.

  2. I had a tough time with this one. On one hand, it’s too meticulous crafted and intriguingly performed to completely write off. On the other hand, it seems bizarre and opaque and not in a ambitious arty way, more like it wants to convey a message which I’m not convinced really comes through. I can only assume that this is supposed to be some kind of class-conscious parable about the dangers of becoming too dependent on the ultra-rich. But if that’s the idea, it’s a super weird way to go about it. Everything is very small-scale and personal, it would be a great character piece with some fine acting if the characters weren’t so completely impenetrable. And there’s just such a strongly pervading sense of grimness and dread that it almost seems comical. You keep waiting for something terrible to happen, but nothing ever really does — until the very, very end, and then it doesn’t seem to be really meaningfully connected to anything that happens in the rest of the movie (as, indeed, in real life it wasn’t, he was just some nut who killed a guy for pretty much no reason).

    I gotta approve of Miller as a filmmaker, this is a super assured and richly detailed work. But he has yet to make a film which I think is as interesting as he seems to think they are.

  3. Not entirely sure why, but I likened the tone of Miller’s two prior films to sitting in the waiting room of the office of a really proficient doctor: clean nearly to the point of being antiseptic, subdued, orderly, and with an atmosphere much more cerebral than emotional.

    I’m guessing that FOXCATCHER will not see Miller breaking stride, but I am curious to find out if he extracted as much from Channing Tatum as Soderbergh did.

  4. I haven’t seen this movie, so I shouldn’t really offer anything here, but I’m going to anyway.

    Mr. S: Maybe there was no message. Maybe you, as a normal person, are trying to make sense of a senseless situation and person. From reading the review from Vern I kept thinking about how much it sounded like Miller was trying to capture true to life mental illness and violent incidents. Shit like these events are bizarre and opaque and people struggle with trying to find a meaning to them, but there often just aren’t any.

    Sometimes there is no way to penetrate characters like this, because the average person cannot understand their motives. When you’re faced with someone like du Pont in real life it’s dumbfounding. You really do get this feeling of dread, because the normal rules suddenly don’t apply, and you’re on pins and needles, waiting for the world to right itself again. It’s that lizard brain telling you that things are not normal. You start looking around at other people as if to ask, “Am I the crazy one here? What am I missing?” I would think that someone like this having money and power would make that situation even more trippy, since he’d have a lot more people catering to his weirdness. Anyway, that’s just my 2 cents, which could be complete bullshit, since I haven’t seen it.

  5. Maggie — I think what you’re describing is in the movie, and is definitely the most interesting thing there. But it gets a little frustrating to watch totally opaque characters act randomly in an unremittingly grim nightmare world for two hours.

    I shouldn’t say “opaque,” quite; in a lot of ways, their motivations are almost ridiculously simple and explicit. But it often seemed like the motivations we’re given don’t really sync up very well with the actions they take. I mean, the movie could barely lay it on any thicker about du Pont wanting to impress/reject his mom. But then again, that doesn’t quite explain how he ended up as weird and creepy as he is. A lot of times the movie veers into fiction in trying to explain its characters via the narrative it’s trying to construct, but since these parts are fictional they don’t always seem to make sense as part of the rest of the real story. So it ends up being a character piece where the characters are completely fascinating second-by second, laughably simplistic on a larger scale, and consequently totally impenetrable cyphers as a whole.

  6. Can we take a second to appreciate Anthony Michael Hall? I really liked him in DEAD ZONE and laughed tears about him, playing a total asshole weirdo in his 3 or 4 episode stint in PSYCH. His extended cameo was even one of the few things I liked about THE DARK [REDACTED]! Unfortunately I don’t see him in as many movies and TV shows as he should be, but he really deserves to be one of those often used and super reliable “Hey, it’s that guy” supporting character actors at this point of his career.


    I forgot to mention it but that line cracked me up.

  8. After reading up on the true events this movie was based on I think this movie was a wasted opportunity.


    Why would you not put the two day standoff in the movie? The guy collects tanks and other wartime paraphernalia. I’m sure the standoff alone would have made an awesome movie.

    I also read that John DuPont had a drinking problem that Ruffalo’s character was trying to help him overcome. That would have made the eventual murder that much more emotional and confusing as it seemed it was in real life. As it is,


    it felt like two hours of nothing happening until DuPont shoots Ruffallo.

  9. Damn, this movie was like was so difficult to get through. From frame one it’s uncomfortable as hell and only gets worse to the conclusion. You’ve got class distinction, father/son issues, mental illness, (possible sexual abuse?? or at least implied) and a bunch of other shit going on and it was like getting a tooth pulled without pain pills. Excruciating.

    Man, this Miller is an up and comer but he’s not afraid of being dour. This picture matches up good with his first outing. Sort of book ends type of deal. He’s certainly a deft filmmaker but like his first one and this one neither worked for me. Majority of the time most of the public would want a specific reason why he killed Dave in the end. The problem is Miller and everybody else doesn’t have one. They have no clue why he did what he did. And that’s a bitter pill to swallow.

  10. The real Mark Schultz certainly did a 180 on his opinion of this movie. In the Daily Mail article, he says “I had no doubts the film would honor the memory of my brother and treat him fairly and it does. I love the film.” And he looks pretty happy in those premiere photos.

    Then some critics interpreted the relationship between du Pont and Schultz in the movie as potentially sexual.

    Now he’s telling Bennett Miller that he’s scum and that he’s going to end his career.


  11. “it felt like two hours of nothing happening”

    Or, y’know, two hours of knowing something fucked up’s going to happen but not knowing exactly what

  12. Obviously I’m speculating, but don’t some super rich people basically treat their children as being no different than their cars, their horses, their pets etc? In others words as property and not people? Maybe that’s why guys like John E. du Pont go crazy.

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