Review: Foxcatcher

To Catch a Predator: Steve Carell and Channing Tatum in Foxcatcher

City Paper grade: A-

Although it’s not entirely free of the plodding About America-ness of Moneyball and Capote, Bennett Miller’s latest has a secret weapon at its center, and it’s not Steve Carell’s nose. As John Eleuthère du Pont, the unstable millionaire who mur-dered Olympic wrestling champion Dave Schultz on his Newtown Square estate in 1996, Carell disappears beneath layers of latex and padding, but he never sinks into du Pont’s skin.

That’s where Channing Tatum’s performance as Dave’s younger brother, Mark Schultz, comes in. Although he was also an Olympic gold medalist, Mark was overshadowed by his more charismatic brother, which in Dan Futterman’s version of the story, leads to a psychic bond between him and du Pont. Tatum’s quiet, self-lacerating bearing gives the movie its broken soul, part wounded puppy, part attack dog. With an early scene where du Pont and Mark look out over the Valley Forge battleground, Foxcatcher lunges for symbolic significance: Mark is an abandoned veteran, a national hero, cast aside once he’s served out his term, reduced to regaling middle-school assemblies for $20 checks. But Miller’s grasp is sure, and the movie’s steady march toward its tragic foregone conclusion feels inevitable rather than redundant.

Foxcatcher softens the extreme nature of the real du Pont’s lunacy so as not to make the Schultzes seem like saps for staying at his compound, succumbing to the lure of steady pay and well-appointed training facilities, and the movie plays loosely enough with the timeline to make it best seen as a generalized statement rather than an interpretation of the real case. But on those terms, it’s a powerful simulation of the whirlpool of wealth, and how people sell themselves a little at a time and then suddenly all at once.