"Foxcatcher"

Foxcatcher aspires to a somber grandness that it only achieves sporadically, like solar flares temporarily bursting out of their star before being sucked back into its gravitational pull.¹ Through the true story of the nebulous relationship between wrestling champion brothers Mark and David Schultz and their billionaire patron John E. DuPont, Bennett Miller and screenwriters E. Max Frye & Dan Futterman try to make an allegory about the illusion of American exceptionalism and the entertaining of that illusion through sport for the masses but their portentous attitude towards their subject and the overt calculation in Miller’s stylistic choices ultimately backfire and twist their film into a distorted counterfeit that, under the pretense of revealing unpleasant hidden truths about American culture, displays the same artificiality and hollowness it purports to denounce.

Experience has shown that a film’s lead performance will often reflect its identity and, by extension, its primary qualities and/or failings. In few other 2014 film has this been truer than in Steve Carell’s portrayal of John E. DuPont, a performance whose very concerted efforts to cause unease while simultaneously personifying American capitalist aristocracy prove to be its undoing. Saddled with a distractingly large prosthetic nose and a falsetto voice, Carell’s DuPont is telegraphed as bad news from his very first appearance and, try as he might, his performance and Miller’s direction offer precious little to tone down or complexify that impression. Wide shots showcase his stiff and awkward movements as if they were proudly displaying results of intensive research; his first conversation with Mark is filmed in a ping-pong game of shot/countershots that seem to actively hunt for any expression of recognizable human emotion on DuPont’s face but can only find a hawk evaluating his prey. Rarely do Carell’s eyes ever express anything that he isn’t making plain to see. It’s a far cry from the hazy between-the-lines ambiguity that made Jake Gyllenhaal’s Lou Bloom so unpredictable, and an even further one from the rich contradictions that made Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Lancaster Dodd and Joaquin Phoenix’s Freddie Quell (whose relationship in The Master has often been compared to DuPont and Mark’s) two of the most fascinating characters to grace cinema screens in the past twenty years. Proportionally to the film, most of Carell’s performance is overly-mannered mimicry and rings as hollow as the manufactured patriotism DuPont surrounds himself with. When Miller forgoes the low-key drabness that permeated Capote’s atmosphere in favour of heavy-handed scenes such as DuPont’s awakening of Mark for some nighttime wrestling that is staged, framed and edited to evoke anal sex, the combined results become almost farcical.

This artificiality renders Foxcatcher’s moments of genuine intuition and cinematic vision both all the more appreciable for their scarcity and all the sadder for the untapped potential they represent. Scenes where Carell temporarily turns his affectations to his advantage – such as a post-victory celebration scene in the trophy room, where DuPont attempts to wrap up the festivities in his usual stiff awkward manner before starting a mock-wrestling match in a clumsy attempt to be “one of the boys” made all the more touching by its success – offer glimpses of a much better performance. In his best scene, DuPont and Mark are both in a helicopter on its way to a gala in Washington D. C., where Mark is to read a speech (penned by DuPont himself) praising his benefactor for being a great “ornithologist, philatelist, philanthropist”. In order to help him articulate those words, DuPont introduces Mark to the cocaine he’s been snorting and another ping-pong game, much more efficient than the previous one, operates as each party repeats the words to the other until Mark is effectively trapped in a verbal whirlwind that almost merges him with his owner. Not as richly complex as The Master’s “processing” scene, it is nonetheless notable for being one of the few moments where the dynamic between the two characters is captured effectively.

Steve Carell may have been given the undeserved Oscar nomination, but it’s Channing Tatum’s Mark who provides Bennett Miller with his best working material. His college jock good looks, which earned him an unfair reputation as an inexpressive slab of meat due to their exploitation in bad action films such as G. I. Joe: The Rise Of Cobra, are put to extremely good use here. Walking with his arms hanging by his sides like a teenaged gorilla, he never seems to be comfortable in any other space than a gym or a stadium, as if his body was simply not built to navigate the halls and corridors of a comfortable home, let alone a manor. Miller is at his best when he films that body in its natural habitat, reacting to DuPont’s presentation of his specially-designed gymnasium by rolling forward in a wide long shot or, in the first wrestling scene with his brother Dave (Mark Ruffalo) where Miller lingers on every major movement before and during its accomplishment, and in doing so transcribes the sibling’s complicated and understated mixture of rivalry and love with little dialogue and indisputable cinematic prowess. But the best employment of Tatum’s physicality – not coincidentally the best shot in the film – comes after DuPont’s vampiric presence breaks Mark’s concentration and self-confidence during a trial match that ends with his defeat. Having quietly internalized DuPont’s belittlements (with the help of drugs) for so long, Mark lets his anger and self-disgust explode in a long handheld shot of varying angles that follows him around his apartment as he repeatedly smashes his head against a mirror and wrecks his furniture.

If Miller, Frye, Futterman and Carell had handled DuPont’s closeted homosexual lust for Mark with the same subtlety and empathy with which they treated Mark’s low self-esteem and confused ambition, Foxcatcher might have had a chance at being the serious human drama it deserves to be. It may even have given it a chance at becoming the great American fresco it clearly wants to be, but that would require an additional dose of humility and political acuity of which the filmmakers seem singularly bereft. Beyond DuPont’s self-proclaimed desire to bring hope back to America (a curious statement coming from a political conservative in the apotheosis of the Reagan-Bush Sr. years), his empty patriotic speeches and the military tank he orders then has sent back like a spoilt child after noticing its lack of a machine gun, Miller and co. do little more than rehash the tired old habit of connecting sexual repression to conservative politics without further study. As DuPont does to himself and his audience, Bennett Miller simply contents himself with flattering the political instincts of the left-leaning critical elite in lieu of having anything of substance to say about his country’s culture. Who would have thought an underseen film belonging to a mostly-dead genre would be more culturally relevant and insightful than a contender for four of the Oscars’ major categories?

¹Apologies to Dr. Stephen Hawking and astronomers everywhere for what I am sure is an analogy of doubtful accuracy.