Foxcatcher

Like the director Bennett Miller's first feature film, Capote (2005), Foxcatcher is a true-crime story, and like his second, 2011's Moneyball, it’s a sports movie that's more concerned with a high-stakes competition and the individual players involved than with any specific athletic event. But unlike those handsome, if shaggy, pictures, Miller’s third effort is a ponderous bore. Channing Tatum stars as Mark Schultz; a world-class wrestler whose accomplishments have been overshadowed by his more respected and celebrated older brother Dave (Mark Ruffalo). When the multimillionaire John du Pont summons the Schultz brothers to his palatial estate and offers to coach them for the 1988 Seoul Olympics, Mark leaps at the chance while Dave stays put. As much as Du Pont fancies himself as a skilled wresting coach, in reality he’s little more than a disturbed one-percenter with paranoid ideas about the decline of American exceptionalism. Both Mark and Dave get caught up in Du Pont’s delusional and dangerous game. Though the film tells the story of the Schultz brothers’ relationship, it’s thematically more interested in Du Pont.

Screenwriters E. Max Frye (Something Wild, Amos & Andrew, Where the Money Is) and Dan Futterman (Capote) adhere closely to historical fact, except for one curious change: although the actual events of this story occurred in the 1990s, the film is set in the 1980s. It’s strange to swap decades when dramatizing a true story, and I can only assume Miller and the writers altered the timeframe in order to goose the film’s political perspective. Their picture is partly an exposé of how untold wealth can corrupt an individual to the point of sociopathic madness, so perhaps setting the story in the wealth-obsessed Reagan era is an understated attempt to drive home the point. But Foxcatcher is hardly a subtle film. The director and writers lay on their subtext so thickly that it's suffocating. There is so much overt speechifying and transparent imagery that we’re not allowed to discover anything for ourselves.  Miller doesn’t make films that are spry or effervescent, but his two previous pictures compensate for their stately pacing and somber tone with electrifying lead performances. Foxcatcher also sports a top shelf cast, but the deft work of the stars isn’t enough to alleviate the morose fatalism of this detached and cerebral movie.

Like Capote and Moneyball, Foxcatcher is an actor’s movie. Both the screenplay (which features some expertly crafted individual scenes, especially in the first act) and the direction seemed geared entirely towards showcasing great acting, rather than telling a great story. Tatum (Magic Mike, 21 Jump Street, White House Down) continues an impressive streak of bringing nuance to characters who in lesser hands might easily seem like one-dimensional lummoxes, and Ruffalo (You Can Count on Me, Zodiac, The Kids Are All Right) reminds us how intensely and powerfully he can act when he's cast appropriately. Both men expertly and wordlessly convey their history, love, tension, and sibling rivalry, and each makes for a convincing athlete in the wrestling sequences.

Carell (The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Little Miss Sunshine, Crazy, Stupid, Love) gives a restrained, creepy turn as Du Pont, but although it's unlike anything we’ve seen from the comic leading man, it’s not a great piece of acting. The real-life Du Pont may not have been a very substantial person, but Carell's take on him is all surface mannerisms. If the point of the film is to explore the hollow, rotten core of a man born into untold wealth, we don't get much insight into this real-life example. Carell will probably garner the same accolades and awards buzz that Philip Seymour Hoffman and Brad Pitt received for Capote and Moneyball, respectively, but his glorified impression does not belong in the company of those exceptional performances.

The consistent through-line in Miller's body of work is his interest in the way people's relationships change gradually over long periods of time. The dynamics between the characters in all three of his features evolve so slowly that the shifts are almost imperceptible (both to the characters and to the audience), and the pace of his films is correspondingly glacial. Capote and Moneyball hold our interest with humor and energetic exchanges between the characters, while the themes are so subtly interwoven with the narratives that we don’t spend time thinking about the films' meanings until after they're over. Foxcatcher, by contrast, is so protracted and lugubrious that it's impossible to fully immerse into the film; and you repeatedly find yourself focusing on the quality of the performances, or the cinematography, or the overriding statement the filmmakers are trying to make. By the time Foxcatcher reaches its disturbing conclusion, you'll not only fail to be shocked, you might not even be awake.