PINNED TO MY SEAT
Strange. Disturbing. And utterly compelling. Foxcatcher, based on the true tale of a wrestler’s murder, is a film you simply must catch
THe odd, t r ue s t ory of ri c h, unbalanced John e. du Pont, the heir to an American chemicals f ortune, and how he came to murder former Ol y mpi c wr es t l i n g champion Dave Schultz, somehow passed me by when i t reached i ts tragic denouement nigh on two decades ago.
By the time i sat down to watch Foxcatcher, however, i had lapped up all the column inches in what has been a formidable publicity campaign.
After so much hype i fully expected to admire but not necessarily enjoy the film. And yet i urge you to see it. Stunningly acted, boldly directed, it unfolds with a haunting, creeping sense of foreboding. There isn’t a wrestling move that for 134 minutes could ALTHOUGH have pi n n e d me more effectively in my seat.
the analogy is irresistible, this isn’t a film about wrestling. if you never had much time for those Saturday afternoon showmen Mick McManus and Jackie Pallo, let alone the purer form of the sport at Olympic level, don’t be put off. Foxcatcher i s about ego, power, control, insecurity and above all about relationships, between brothers, between mother and son, between protege and mentor.
For al l t he particular, unsettling peculiarities of the s t ory, it’ s about human dynamics familiar to us all.
The screenplay, by e. Max Frye and Dan Futterman ( who also wrote Capote, a bout a nother st r a nge, singular American), revolves around the younger of the t wo wr es t l i n g Schultz brothers, Mark. Wonderfully played by Channing Tatum, he is as introspective and dour as Dave (the equally splendid Mark Ruffalo) is open and amiable.
Both brothers are Olympic champions but Dave is more feted, as a coach as well as a participant. He has a wife, Nancy (Sienna Miller), and children; Mark is single, eco-
nomical with words, under- confident, devoted to Dave but also in his shadow.
Bennett Miller’s film t akes forgivable liberties with the truth, compressing time while expanding the age gap between the brothers. They were actually born less than 18 months apart; in the film, Dave seems at least a decade older.
That helps to emphasise the older sibling’s protective instincts, and the younger’s neediness. But the real Mark Schultz has taken exception to that, and has erupted, volcanically, over Miller’s hint of a homoerotic charge between him and du Pont.
We first meet du Pont, as Mark does, at his vast and handsome Foxcatcher estate. To play him, quite remarkably well, Steve Carell has buried his usual goofy persona under make-up and prosthetics. These give him the disconcerting look of a burns victim, but we soon realise that he is damaged psychologically, not physically.
He is obsessed with wrestling, and wants to fund Mark and t he USA wrestling t eam, providing them with the best new training facilities that old money can buy.
Unfortunately, Mark has made a pact with the devil. Slowly,wly, he is sucked into du Pont’s thrall.all. And du Pont in turn is in thrall to his elderly mother (a fleeting but magnetic cameo f rom Vanessa Redgrave). There is an electrifying scene in which she arrives at the gym while du Pont, ludicrously assuming the position of team coach,c tries to prove his worth to her. She watches, unimpressed, as he puts his wrestlers through theirt paces, then wearily has her nursen wheel her out. She understands that he is using his wealth to buy relationships, because it’s a road she set him on herself, having paid the chauffeur’s son to be his friend when he was a boy.
Gradually, du Pont’s friendship withw Mark implodes, so he turns hishi attention to Dave, all the whilew asserting his own role, whichw he alone perceives as pivotal,pi in the drive to dominate the world of wrestling.
There is another unforgettable s cene i n which Dave, f or a documentary lionising du Pont, is Champion: Channing Tatum as Mark Schultz and Steve Carell as John E. du Pont in Foxcatcher asked to explain to the camera how the ‘coach’ has inspired him, but simply cannot find the words. Even if you don’t know what happens next, it is by now a story plainly bound for a painful ending.
Will it get a Best Picture nod when the Academy Award nominations are unveiled next week? Unequivocally, it should. I might have seen two or three films as fine as this in the past 12 months, but no more than that.
FoxCATCHER’S three main players are superb in their different ways — you won’t believe how good Carell is in such an unfamiliar guise — and Miller directs with an impressively sure hand. He eschews music except when it adds to the mood (a rare exhibition of restraint these days), and elevates the suspense brilliantly.
The same director showed with Moneyball (2011) that he could tell a true, all-American story with great verve. This i s a much more disturbing t al e, but j ust as all-American.
IN TAKEN 3, Liam Neeson’s ‘ excovert operative’, Bryan Mills, phones his daughter. ‘ Something terrible has happened,’ he tells her, and that is i ndubitably true: s omeone, possibly hi s bank manager, has persuaded Neeson to make another Taken film.
It is unspeakably awful, a ragbag of cliches with a narrative (by the increasingly ridiculous Luc Besson) so preposterous that the only way to get through it without chewing through the back of your hand is to treat it as a comedy.
This time, poor Bryan (who can kill a man at 100 paces practically by flaring his nostrils, yet is as accident-prone as Mr Bean), loses his ex-wife to a bunch of unsavoury Russians, and contrives to be framed for her murder.
So he dives underground, in more ways than one, with the only competent cop in t he LAPD ( Forest Whitaker) i n hot but respectful pursuit.
Meanwhile, Bryan must protect his daughter Kim (Maggie Grace) from the attention of the baddies, which he does with the help of a yogurt drink. I’d say at this point that you really have to see it, but you really don’t.
olivier Megaton directs, and his glorious surname perfectly evokes the bomb that should have been dropped on this project at the moment of conception.