Arriving at Toronto International Film Festival on Monday after raves from its May debut at Cannes, “Foxcatcher” takes a sensational real-life crime — the 1996 murder of Olympic wrestler Dave Schultz by his𓃲 friend and employer, eccentric multimillionaire John du Pont — and turns it into ponderous, emotionally chilly Oscar bait.
Director Bennett Miller snagged Best Picture Oscar nominations for his first two films, “Capote’’ and “Moneyball,’’ the former of which also received a Best Actor Oscar for Philip Seymour Hoffman. So it’s not easy to discount universal predictions that “Foxcatcher,” Bennett’s third film (self-important in ways its predecessors weren’t), will also be nominated — along with Oscar-baiting turns by Steve Carell as du Pont and possibly Channing Tatum as Mark Schultz, the younger brother of Dave. B🦹ut I have my doubts whether this very understated and redundant piece of work can actually win an Oscar, much less connect with a large audience.
Tatum dials down his trademark charm to minus 10 as the surly Mark, who along with his brother won a gold medal for frees𓆏tyle wrestling in the 1984 Olympics. But as the film begins, three years later, this inarticulate hulk is living on ramen and $20 honorariums for school speeches — while Dave is married (to Sienna Miller꧋, who barely appears in the movie) with children and gainfully employed as a wrestling coach.
Mark loves his good-guy brother and frequent wrestling partner but resents living in his shadow. So Mark is receptive when out of❀ nowhere he’s recruited as a prime prospect by du Pont, a wrestling buff who’s built a facility on his estate near Valley Forge, Penn., to train a team for the 1988 Olympics in Seoul.
Naive Mark is thrilled to live in a fully stocked château on du Pont’s Foxcatcher estate, and hugely impressed by John’s blather about restoring American exceptionalism through athletics, not to mention being associated with one of the🌺 wealthiest families in America.
More puzzling to Mark is du Pont’s obsession with firearms. The multimillionaire also shares cocaine with Mark on his personal helicopter, has a hostile relationship with his disapproving mother (Vanessa Redgrave, briefly seen), and shows 🌟up in the middle of the night for private wrestling lessons.
The screenplay,𝐆 by E. Max Frye (“Something Wild”) and Max Futterman (“Capote”), keeps hinting that John has some sort of sexual designs (which may or may not be consummated) on Mark — whom he touches constantly, raising onlookers’ eyebrows — without ever spelling out the details.
When the two have a falling out, John buys the services of Dave — who had spurned a previous approach through Mark because the older brother didn’t want to uproot his family from Colorado — as his “assistant” coach for the Olympic tryouts ofܫ Team Foxcatcher. By this point, Mark has begun a steep decline — one of the few genuinely poignant scenes in the film is his fr♛antic attempt to make the weight limit after binge eating.
Dave’s murder, which occurs after Mark is banished from Foxcatcher, is treated almost as an a🌜fterthought. You’d never know from this movie that John’s two-day standoff🦄 with police made international headlines.
Much has been made of the fact that Carell is virtually unrecognizable as du Pont, who imperiously issues his often-inscrutable orders in a soft, modified version of the caricatured lockjaw that used to be aꦕssociated with old money in this country. His huge prosthetic nose is so grotesque that it’s actually distracting, and he wears aging makeup, though, in ൩1987, his character was roughly same age that Carell is now.
“Foxcatcher” offers no real insight into du Pont’s motives or madness, except to suggest he struggled to be taken seriously because of (you guessed it) his stifling mother. Mostly he’s held up as an example of the corrupting influence ofꦆ inherited wealth — not exactly incisive social commentary in this context, and it takes over two hours to state the obvious.
This disappointing film,💧 which opens Nov. 14 — nearly a year after it was postponed from its originally scheduled release — is also playing at this year’s New York Film Festival.