Foxcatcher

Foxcatcher (15)

USA 2014  139 mins  Dir: Bennett Miller  Starring: Steve Carell, Channing Tatum, Mark Ruffalo, Anthony Michael Hall, Sienna Miller, Vanessa Redgrave

The first thing you notice is the snout. It’s a proper-job large and unflattering fake conk in the tradition of those sported by actors of the calibre of Nicole Kidman (The Hours) or Meryl Streep (The Iron Lady) to draw the attention of gong-givers. Lurking beneath this one, however, is the unlikely figure of Steve Carell – he of The 40-Year-old Virgin and the US version of The Office. Carell spends much of Foxcatcher looking down it or showing it off in profile. But he does more than make a bid for Best Performance by a Prosthetic Beak. With a hunched posture, whiny voice and layers of aging make-up, he undergoes a remarkable transformation to play John Eleuthere du Pont, unprepossessing scion of America’s wealthiest family.

It’s 1987, and Mark Schultz (Tatum) is curiously down in the dumps for a man who won an Olympic gold medal for wrestling just three years earlier. It soon becomes clear that Mark has always lived in the shadow of his fellow gold medal-winning elder brother Dave (Ruffalo) and is now reduced to giving motivational lectures to primary school children at twenty bucks a pop. He’s then summoned by du Pont to a world of vast wealth and privilege. The tycoon, who styles himself the Golden Eagle of America, explains that he plans to restore national pride by creating his own wrestling squad, Team Foxcatcher, to compete at the 1988 Seoul Olympics. And he wants Mark to train them at a specially constructed state-of-the-art facility on his vast Pennsylvania estate.

Capote director Bennett Miller and writer Dan Futterman reunite for this acutely observed car crash of old money and blue collar sporting heroism which ignites two combustible damaged personalities with tragic consequences. A weedy, lonely, socially maladriot oddball surrounded by flunkies, du Pont enjoys power, deference and status conferred by his vast wealth. But he craves respect for his patriotic efforts, not least from his imperious mother (Redgrave), who regards him with scarcely concealed contempt and dismisses wrestling as “a low sport”. In contrast to his gregarious family man brother, Mark is a troubled, insecure loner who internalises his emotions and seizes the opportunity to strike out on his own.

It’s not long before du Pont introduces the young wrestler to cocaine and invites him to participate in private late night mano a mano training sessions. The film draws a discreet veil over what these entail, but Mark is soon sporting highlights in his hair and has added a streak of self-loathing to his sullen demeanour. It doesn’t help that, like everyone else in his life, du Pont is simply using him to get to Dave.

Boasting a trio of outstanding central performances – plus a magnificent supporting one from veteran Vanessa Redgrave, who radiates toxic withering contempt from every pore – Miller’s slowburning drama resists modish psychoanalysis in favour of an accretion of telling detail as the pitiful du Pont becomes increasingly tyrannical and unhinged. He shows off Mark like a trophy, bathing in the reflected glory, and even commissions a hagiographic documentary about himself, for which participants have to be cajoled into describing him as a mentor and father figure. It’s obvious that this is all going to end badly. But if you don’t know the story, the way in which it plays out will come as quite a shock.