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| Foxcatcher |
If the reviews out of the Cannes Film Festival are any indication, primarily comedic actor Steve Carell should demand to be taken a lot more seriously from now on. The actor’s turn as sociopathic multimillionaire John DuPont in Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher is earning rave reviews.
Carell plays an oddly-sheltered multimillionaire who invites wrestler Mark Shulz (Channing Tatum), the overlooked younger brother to Mark Ruffalo’s Olympian Dave Shulz, to live and train as part of the U.S. wrestling team prepping for the 1988 Olympics at his remote compound near Valley Forge. The initial paternalistic relationship turns sinister.
Miller who created compelling portraits out of his previous subjects in his last two films Moneyball and Capote seems to have done it again, pulling Oscar-caliber performances out of all his actors.
Bennett Miller's sports movie Foxcatcher – based on a grisly true story – is a superb tragicomedy of the beta-male, a nightmare of the also-ran and almost-ran. ("Silver? In the mid-80s, it was home to John DuPont – played here by Steve Carell with a superb feel for the role's absurdity and anguish, but stopping short of caricature.
So John gets in touch with a blue-collar guy called Mark Schulz (Channing Tatum), a wrestler and gold-medal-winner at the '84 LA Games, who is the younger brother of the smarter, more charismatic and more successful wrestler and coach Dave Schulz (Mark Ruffalo). Mark is used to people talking to him when they really want to talk to his cooler brother. DuPont mouths tender platitudes about seeing Mark's potential and allowing him to emerge from his brother's shadow. Whatever the reason, Mark is angry and humiliated when he realises his new, rich quasi-dad prefers Dave; Dave, for his part, is angry and humiliated at having to kowtow to his new master. Just as in his previous film, Moneyball (2011), Miller here reveals a connoisseur's eye for the arenas and corporate spaces of sport: the training rooms, gyms, pennants, the offices – all the exciting outward show of sports prestige. Miller has a lovely scene when DuPont shows Mark the sumptuously appointed new training area he has set up at Foxcatcher, and with boyish excitement, Mark can't help going into some moves, trying it out.
Channing Tatum's Mark is vulnerable and sad; Mark Ruffalo's Dave is smart and professional and his shame at taking the DuPont shilling is correspondingly intense. And Steve Carell's DuPont is a compelling monster – but a monster who inspires not fear but pity.
Perhaps Foxcatcher may yet create a new genre to match the boxing movie: the "wrestling movie" – the kind that Barton Fink was trying to write in the Coens' film. It is a gripping film: horrible, scary and desperately sad.
Nine years ago, Bennett Miller directed Philip Seymour Hoffman in Capote, for which the late star went on to win a best actor Oscar. Critics at Cannes on Monday were tipping Miller to repeat the trick at next year's Academy Awards, following the first screening of his new movie, Foxcatcher – which features a radical change of pace for Steve Carell.
Carell, best known for mainstream comedies such as The 40 Year Old Virgin and Crazy Stupid Love, plays John Eleuthere du Pont, an idiosyncratic multi-millionaire who bankrolled the US wrestling squad in the mid 1990s. With prosthetic nose, whittled eyebrows, yellowing teeth and glassy-eyed stare, Carell's du Pont is an oblique creep, a misguided patriot and a frustrated mummy's boy. Amid a shower of five star reviews, it was Carell's revelatory performance which drew the best notices.
Carell researched du Pont extensively, reading reams of material about the Pennsylvania dynasty of industrial tycoons and watching the documentaries they commissioned about themselves. Du Pont himself died in 2010, in the prison to which he was sent after his friendship with two Olympic-gold winning wrestling brothers, Mark (Channing Tatum) and Dave Schultz (Mark Ruffalo) ended in tragedy.
The du Pont family themselves are not involved with the production, but Dave Schultz's widow, Nancy (played by Sienna Miller in the film), was present for some of the shoot. One scene shows them wrestling in the library at night, at du Pont's command and to Schultz's discomfort.
"There's a lot of American male repressed, non-communication happening in this film," Miller said. "It's not a political film [and] does not take a moral position. Miller recalled asking Carell whether he could imagine living without the latter, which the actor laughingly said he couldn't. I don't think characters in film know if they're in a comedy or a drama. It's been a long wait for Bennett Miller's Foxcatcher, which seemed a sure-thing award contender in 2013 before it was dramatically rescheduled for a post-awards spring 2014 release.
The film is based on the true story of the unstable heir to the du Pont chemical fortune, John du Pont (Steve Carell). The multimillionaire was found guilty in 1997 of the shooting death of gold-medal wrestler Dave Schultz (Mark Ruffalo), who had trained on his Pennsylvania estate with his brother, Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum).
Just as Philip Seymour Hoffman transformed to Truman Capote in Capote, so does Carell in the socially awkward du Pont role — with the help of a prosthetic nose and makeup. The movie trade website Variety is already hailing Carell's performance as an "Oscar lock" (while distributor Sony Pictures Classics has moved the release to awards-friendly Nov. 14).
The wrestling is performed at a high level; the two actors worked for six months of intensive training before filming, often under the coaching of Mark Schultz.
Ruffalo says the film is like a Greek tragedy fueled by a family fortune.
