Bennett Miller's Foxcatcher is perched between an American nightmare and a family tragedy, which from a vantage angle are probably undistinguishable. It's also a story of a love triangle, an unlikely kind, involving two brothers and another man who asserts himself (most notably his nose) between them. Splashed across the screen before the whole thing starts is the solemn declaration "based on a true story" — an old Hollywood habit of codifying history into truth and fiction into biography — though in this case, it works to add weight and shock to the narrative that follows.
At the centre of this taut, almost airtight film are three strong performances. Channing Tatum plays Mark Schultz, a thick-bodied wrestler with a Neanderthal gait, limited vocabulary, and who's referred to at one point as "an ape". Schultz is an Olympic gold medallist in 1984, and much of his athletic success is owed to his brother Dave (Mark Ruffalo, looking very much different from the last time we saw him as a frazzled music producer in Begin Again), an intelligent coach, a loving father of two, and a medal-winning wrestler himself. As the film opens, we see them train: Mark and Dave are locked in man-to-man muscled caresses, their brotherly bond fuelling the lidded violence of the sport that's sometimes dubbed primitive and "low".
The third performance that has elicited discussion in this award season comes from Steve Carell, who's nominated for best actor at next week's Golden Globes and a sure-fire Oscar contender. In Foxcatcher, he plays John du Pont, an eccentric, creepy and increasingly disturbing heir and megalomaniac-in-chief of the Du Pont empire — "the wealthiest family in America", thanks to his ancestors' industrial manufacturing of chemicals and military arms — who brings Mark under his wing. Carell appears in the film with a prominent prosthetic nose that juts itself into the frame like an attention-craving scene-stealer; it takes a while to incorporate that fake organ into our perception of the character. Regardless of its likeness to John du Pont's real nose, the prosthetic is an always-on switch that perpetually reminds us of the man's weirdness.
And weirder he gets. Du Pont offers to sponsor Mark as he prepares for the 1988 Seoul Olympics by housing him in Foxcatcher Farm, a vast family property now doubling as the US wrestling team's training facility. In his deluded head, du Pont sees himself as a star of his own show — he's a coach of the wrestling team, a mentor to Mark, a generous philanthropist and above all, a true American patriot who's performing the duty of making sure that his great country is soaring like a Golden Eagle (that's the nickname he's given to himself). The narrative concerning Mark, Dave and du Pont becomes an allegory of the American dream and inevitable nightmare, of the implicit class war and the implosion of hollow patriotic claims.
Miller's previous films were Capote and Moneyball, and they, too, relate the dysfunction of the American kind. In Foxcatcher, the director has found a perfect symbol in the story of the two working class brothers caught in the sinister delusion of an East Coast billionaire; Mark, arriving at the estate, goes through successive phases as du Pont's employee, lackey, drug buddy, toy boy and victim, as the loony rich man sells him an empty dream disguised as patriotism. There's a hint of homoeroticism that compounds the portrait of the pitiful and pitiable du Pont, a man oppressed by the weight of family history and particularly by his cold, aristocratic mother (Vanessa Redgrave, dutifully icy). But sympathy for the devil, the film argues, doesn't make him less of a devil.
The film's mood is all-seriousness and gravitas, as if pulled by an invisible lead (though Carell manages some dark humour poker-facedness). From conception, it is an Oscar contender; Miller also won Best Director from Cannes, where Foxcatcher premiered last May. His choice is to drain emotion from the proceedings as a way to de-sensationalise the possibly lurid details, and to lock Mark, Dave and du Pont in that slow-burn vortex. This is an engaging character study, though it sometimes strays into ponderousness. The critique of American idealism — real or phony — also means a risk of reducing his characters into parables and psychological mannerisms (in this sense, David Fincher's The Social Network and Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood find more stable footing and encompassing scope; someone even brought up Citizen Kane in a passing reference, which is a stretch). In the end, nevertheless, it's the three male leads that bring the human story to the foreground; to me, Channing Tatum's proto-Homo-Sapiens wrestler/caveman is startling to watch, much more than Carell's repeated eerie antics. The collapse of the dream is often more spectacular, and more unsettling, than the gilded hammer that brought it down.
