Foxcatcher
2014
**½
Director: Bennett Miller
Cast: Steve Carell, Channing Tatum, Mark Ruffalo, Sienna Miller, Vanessa Redgrave, Anthony Michael Hall, Guy Boyd, Brett Rice, Samara Lee, Jackson Frazer
Mark and Dave Schultz, gold medal winners in wrestling at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, are invited to train and live at the private Foxcatcher Farm training facility. Mark takes on the offer but his older brother Dave is harder to persuade. Their sponsor, John E. du Pont, is a millionaire wrestling enthusiast who likes to see himself as a mentor and father figure, but can money buy respect? Following Capote and Moneyball, this is Bennett Miller's third real-life story in a row. This one deals with some big themes (feelings of inferiority, delusions of grandeur, and sense of entitlement), but it amounts to little more than a curious historical anecdote. The film cannot get under the skin of its three main characters, especially that of Du Pont. The end result is a somber, slow-moving drama with a shock ending, which seems to come out of nowhere. Carell, Tatum, and Ruffalo, each with a prosthetic nose, give wonderfully understated performances.
