What's there to say about a movie like Foxcatcher? It's impeccably wrought, well-acted and precisely controlled, yet I didn't get anything out of the experience that would make me want to recommend it to someone else. It's cold, it's moody, it's unsettling...but essentially that's all it is, and a movie has to have more to it than simply a sense of atmosphere. There has to be something of a story worth telling, or characters worth knowing- something that leaves you feeling that what you're being shown is in some way worth your time. I did not get that from this film as a whole, despite the finely tuned crafting of the individual pieces of it.
In 1987, Olympic wrestler Mark Schulz, here played by Channing Tatum, was invited to the "Foxcatcher" estate of billionaire John DuPont, whose goal was to provide training grounds for the 1988 Olympic wrestling team and be their coach and advisor. There was no real sense of purpose in DuPont's life, or so this movie would have you believe, as he was endlessly searching for something to build his legacy on, using his mass inherited wealth to do so. He had no talents of his own, or close friends, and he may have also been using this endeavor to buy himself some of those, as he seemed to want the wrestlers to look up to him as a father figure and a mentor. Or maybe he was physically attracted to them, as the movie vaguely hints, using their presence to work out his hidden sexual desires.
The film doesn't outright tell us any of this, that's only me theorizing based on the slightest inferences sprinkled throughout this slowly paced, methodical telling of what happened at the DuPont estate. It ended in the tragic killing of Mark Schulz's brother Dave, also an Olympic wrestler, but this film wants us to observe and question what it is that led to that event. I can't say that I have any kind of an answer, and that's because the movie never focuses on any one aspect of the story it purportedly wants to tell. In some ways this is a character study, not simply of John DuPont, but of each of the Schulz brothers as well. The movie at times trades off between them, and we see various angles of the relationship between Mark and DuPont from different viewpoints, but always from a carefully observed distance. There's not enough intimacy involved in any of it to know what's really going on under the surface, and the tone is maddeningly opaque.
