John du Pont (left) and Olympic wrestler Dave Schultz at the Foxcatcher National Training Center in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania
John du Pont is taken from a van on his way to the Newtown Square, Pennsylvania police station after his arrest in 1996
Wrestlers Dave Schultz (left) and his brother Mark compare Olympic Gold medals won at the 1984 Olympics
This is a very downbeat and dreary film that seems to be as
much about depression as anything else, but also a sense of disillusionment in
the American Dream, where there’s something inherently wrong with the core
values, reflected after the euphoria of America’s dominance of the Olympic
Games in Los Angeles in 1984, a jingoistic television bonanza, by the way, for
an event that was boycotted by the Russians (1984 Summer Olympics boycott) along
with 14 other Eastern Bloc nations, significantly lessening the quality of the
competition. The 80’s was also an era of
massive steel plant shutdowns, shifting their operations overseas, leaving a
devastating hole for American workers to overcome, and Reaganomics,
implementing a laissez-faire free market “trickle down” system that
eliminated corporate regulations for the wealthy, where the rich got richer and
the poor got significantly poorer, as the President froze minimum wage rates,
slashed federal assistance to local governments by 60%, eliminating antipoverty
Block Grant programs, while cutting the budgets for public housing in half,
creating a surge of homelessness that continues to this day. While it was an era of supposed economic
optimism where millionaires received special tax breaks, it was largely a hoax,
not the economic miracle advertised, as it was paid for by mounting credit,
where the national debt rose from $900 billion to $2.8 trillion during Reagan’s
tenure. This created the perception of a
divided nation, the wealthy, an upper middle class, and everybody else, where
poor and minority citizens viewed Reagan as indifferent to their daily
struggles. This movie does accurately
reflect not only an economic divide, but also the last vestiges of the Cold War
mentality, filled with the notion that American know-how and wealthy
entrepreneurs were somehow responsible for reviving the sagging American spirit
and bringing the nation back to its “rightful” position of international
prominence. Much like the Eastern
European nations had full government support backing their athletes, America
needed similar avenues of financial support for those non-professional athletes
that dedicated their lives to training for Olympic competition. Filling the void was corporate America, who
offered their sponsorship, providing uniforms, equipment, live-in training
facilities, and various services and products that account for 40% of Olympic
revenues. Even today, when corporate
sponsorship falls through, many U.S. Olympic athletes are left with only one
back-up plan—joining the Army.
While this film makes the claim that it is based on a true
story, this is only partially true, as the way the story is told is completely
misleading, only raising more questions, as one of the final sequences
condenses 7-years of time in a single shot, giving the audience the impression
one event led to another, never providing the context for the missing
years. So this is a fictionalized
retelling of a true story, written by E. Max Frye and Dan Futterman, given the
Hollywood treatment of creative license.
Frye, by the way, wrote the brilliantly inventive SOMETHING WILD (1986)
by Jonathan Demme, while Futterman wrote the screenplay for Bennett’s earlier
film CAPOTE (2005). What’s special about
the film is not the direction, though it was awarded Best Director at Cannes,
but the performances, where two of the three main characters are barely
recognizable to the public, Steve Carell with a prosthetic nose as eccentric
multi-millionaire John du Pont, heir to the chemical company fortune, and Mark
Ruffalo with a beard and receding hairline as Olympic gold medalist wrestler
Dave Schultz, older brother to Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum), both winning gold
medals in wrestling at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. The story is seen through the eyes of Mark
Schultz, both brothers losing their parents at an early age, moving
continuously to various family members, leading hard scrabble, blue collar
lives where Dave largely looked after his little brother for the duration of
his life. In an early morning wrestling
practice between the two brothers taking place in a dark and dingy gym, the
bulked up physique of Mark is familiar, but Ruffalo completely loses himself in
this character, where the two barely speak to one another, but violently throw
each other around the mat, expressing the sheer brutality of the sport. While Dave is pursued by corporate sponsors,
out of the blue Mark receives a call from John du Pont, who has built a state-of-the-art,
world class wrestling facility on the 800-acre grounds of the du Pont family
estate overlooking Valley Forge, where the logo is Foxcatcher. Du Pont’s wealth is everpresent, but he’s
interested in sponsoring a team of wrestlers for the upcoming World
Championships and the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, Korea. While calling himself a patriot inspired to
rebuild America’s image around the world, the personal interest expressed in
Mark takes on that of a paternal relationship, where du Pont revels in being
the father figure to such an esteemed athlete, an interest paralleled with that
of his distant mother (Vanessa Redgrave) who raises world class horses.
Despite moving away from his brother to live on the grounds,
Mark succeeds brilliantly, going on to win the World Championships in 1985, as
his brother had done earlier in 1983, the only brother pair to ever achieve
such exalted success in the sport. Both
had brilliant collegiate careers as well that the film ignores, dealing instead
with du Pont’s interest in one of the Schultz brothers. After the victory, du Pont introduces Mark to
several bad habits, namely alcohol and cocaine, while showcasing him to his
peers, often at events honoring John du Pont, where Mark offers additional
complimentary praise on his behalf. As
the two spend so much time together, they actually become friends, something
neither one of them had as kids, both defined by loneliness, feeling unloved,
dwarfed by the more powerful influence of their families, where du Pont
apparently could never please his mother, where the only friend he had in
childhood was paid to be his friend by his mother, while Mark was always under
the influence of his older brother. Dave
is happily married with kids, so did not feel comfortable uprooting his family,
especially after the instability of his own childhood. But without Dave’s influence, Mark goes off
his training regimen, becomes psychologically unhinged, forgetting about his
passion for the sport, where du Pont quickly turns on him, becoming abusive, contemptuously
treating him like an ungrateful child, losing his favored status. In an unorthodox move, du Pont hires his
older brother Dave to come to the camp along with his family and train the
Foxcatcher team for the 1988 Olympics.
Mark loses his confidence, initially hiding his bad habits from his
brother, and goes into a psychological tailspin so severe that even his brother
can’t turn it around, where du Pont’s overcontrolling influence has poisoned
the waters. After a disastrous Olympic
performance, Mark leaves the compound to get away from du Pont, leaving Dave
behind to continue coaching the team, as once more, Dave was not interested in
moving his family. Du Pont, on the other
hand, traded in one Schultz brother for the other. Nonetheless, in marked contrast with the
stability of his brother Dave, who’s a brilliant coach with a loving family,
the film spends so much time exploring the instability of Mark’s character that
du Pont’s mental meltdown all but blindsides the audience. While more than 7 years pass after Mark
leaves the compound, with Dave still coaching at Foxcatcher throughout, the
film makes it seem like the very next moment when du Pont goes after Dave,
seemingly unable to break his will as he had his younger brother, shooting him
senselessly in front of his family, leaving 20 former Foxcatcher athletes
without training or coaching resources six months before the 1996 Olympic Games
in Atlanta. The event arrives with a
thud, as the focus of the film showcases Mark’s fragile state of mind
throughout, becoming Tatum’s most complex character to date, so the shift away
from him is simply odd. Despite Carell’s
grotesque, emotionally peculiar performance as du Pont, a man who knows little
about the sport of wrestling, no inner pathology for du Pont is ever developed,
instead remaining isolated and emotionally
erratic throughout, continually overshadowed by the actual talent and
accomplishments of the Schultz brothers.
Note
In an odd twist of events, du Pont’s will stipulated that
80% of his assets outside the family trust would go to Bulgarian wrestler Valentin
Jordanov Dimitrov and his family, who lived at the Foxcatcher compound at
the time of the murder and went on to win a gold medal at the 1996 Olympic
Games. Dimitrov was also the executor of
the will. Along with a bronze medal at
the 1992 Olympics, Dimitrov was a seven-time world champion, seven-time
European champion, and the only wrestler to hold 10 medals (7 gold, 2 silver
and 1 bronze) from the World Championships.
When the International Olympic Committee eliminated wrestling as an
Olympic event in 2013, one of only two Olympic sports, along with boxing, that
still require participants to have amateur status to participate, Dimitrov
returned his 1996 Olympic gold medal in protest. After a public outcry, seven months later
wrestling was reinstated back into the Olympics, while baseball/softball and
squash were dropped instead.
