Foxcatcher ***½ (2014, Steve Carell, Channing Tatum, Mark Ruffalo, Sienna Miller, Vanessa Redgrave) – Movie Review

Director Bennett Miller’s well-acted, classy and interesting but over-rated biopic tries to get under the skin of real-life Olympic wrestling champion brothers Mark and David Schultz, who are lured by multimillionaire sponsor John E. du Pont into joining his Team Foxcatcher to train for the 1988 games in Seoul. Mark Schultz and John du Pont are indeed one heck of an odd couple, as their relationship starts in high hopes with Mark seeing his benefactor as a father figure, then fractures suddenly and ends in tragedy. What the hell is du Pont up to?

Foxcatcher gets marks for its unusual story and adult intelligence, but loses them for being long and meandering, and never getting to grips with its characters, its essential mystery of why all this happened and, most especially, what du Pont was up to. It’s like an Agatha Christie thriller without the last chapter, it’s that frustrating. Is John E. du Pont just a nutter? Is that all this is? If so, they could have told us in the first 15 minutes and saved us a couple of hours’ waiting around time.

The movie is effectively creepy, and unsettling as you’ve no idea where it’s headed, which does help promote audience involvement through the over-long running time. But, then it ultimately doesn’t seem to get anywhere, and it turns out that it would be better as a noir-style fictional thriller, maybe along Sunset Blvd lines.

That said, the performances are great, with Channing Tatum unusually stretched to flex his acting muscles as Mark, Steve Carell virtually unrecognisable with a daft false nose and intensely impressive in a straight role and Mark Ruffalo his usual dependable self as older brother Mark. Carell and Ruffalo have swung deserved Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild nominations as Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor, with the film Golden Globe nominated as Best Motion Picture, Drama.

Sienna Miller and poor old Vanessa Redgrave are pretty much side issues and rather wasted and lost as the wife Nancy Schultz and the crazy, dominating mother Jean du Pont. It’s all very Psycho. Redgrave, particularly, deserves much more to do. She has hardly more than a cameo. Even though she isn’t particularly well cast as an American conservative matriarch, I’d still like to see a lot more of her. E. Max Frye and Dan Futterman‘s screenplay could do with a fair amount of pruning and rewriting.

Miller’s also the director of Capote (2005) and Moneyball (2011). Futterman wrote the Capote screenplay. Miller won Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival 2014 and it is the AFI Movie of the Year.

The real Mark Schultz says that Foxcatcher ‘couldn’t have portrayed me more inaccurately if they tried. The personalities and relationships between the characters in the film are primarily fiction and somewhat insulting.’

Premiering in the UK at the London Film Festival on 16 October 2014.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Movie Review

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