Before I review Foxcatcher, I want to clarify that it is based on the film, not the book, which I plan to read. I am aware that the movie does not accurately represent historical events, and I have no first hand knowledge of any events that are portrayed in or inspired Foxcatcher.
What is the literal meaning of the word, “Foxcatcher?” This question plagued me as I watched the film. Taken literally, someone is the hunter, and someone is the fox. In US, fox hunting is called fox chasing because the hunters may not kill the fox. Fox hunting is a tradition way older than US, tied to wealth, land and eliminating pests. It is not supposed to be a solitary activity, but involves multiple hunters, horses, hounds, and foxes. It started as a practical way to destroy vermin that threaten farm animals, but has become a highly ritualized and stylized social practice. I know that Foxcatcher Farm was also the home of John E. du Pont, one of the characters in Foxcatcher. It is not mentioned in the film, but there was an amateur wrestling move called the Foxcatcher Five: when stuck in a hold, you grab and briefly squeeze your opponents testicles.
Why am I reading so much into this one word? When Foxcatcher starts, it feels like we have entered a world that started long before we arrived. I even initially wondered if the tragic events had already happened, and we were seeing the consequences, which we weren’t. Foxcatcher is a mournful movie. It feels like the trap is already set. It opens with a destitute Olympian talking to elementary-aged children, standing among world worn workers at a fast food restaurant and eating ramen. These images are incongruous with what he is supposed to represent. The game is already rigged so expertly that most foxes want to be caught and may willingly domesticate themselves to become hounds.
If there is a titular character, it is du Pont, though he is not the main character and is not present throughout the movie. du Pont is surrounded by attendants who act as his intermediaries and officials between du Pont and anyone else, including the Olympian and his fellow wrestlers. These intermediaries are simultaneously omnipresent and invisible and are basically creators of du Pont’s world-they are meant to handle the practical realities in making du Pont’s fantasy into reality and eliminate the undesirable aspects from his world. I only began to think of them as characters when I realized that Anthony Michael Hall played one of them (I recognize his voice, not his appearance). They are unquestioning and only one time, during the denouement, do they do anything to distinguish themselves from du Pont and behave as individuals.
There is one main supporting actor, Mark Ruffalo, who basically plays as perfect a person as we can get in any movie. He is a loving family man with clear priorities and boundaries. He knows who he is. He is an Olympian and a coach-not everyone can teach and do, but he can. He is willing to compromise to provide for his Olympian ideals and family, but not so much that he loses who he is unlike the main character, his brother, played by Channing Tatum, whom we see in the opening scenes.
du Pont is the polar opposite of Ruffalo. He is all resources, but has no identity. He wants to connect and be loved, but is incapable of doing it without buckets of money, manipulation and men. He was probably unconsciously self-medicating. He is a man also trapped by restrictions. Those restrictions are not financial, but social and mental. He lives in a fantasy world that not only victimizes those he exploits, but ultimately destroys him. He needed somebody to yoke him up, take him to a doctor, medicate him, expose him to the real world and let him find out who he truly was in it, but he doesn’t. Wealth gives him a world, but not a life.
Tatum’s character is stuck in between. He also has an identity crisis, but not the financial means to mask it. He wants independence through dependence and eventually abandons his ideals. He lives, but unlike the other two characters, is the only one that is punished by surviving. He has no anchor, is left adrift and alone. He is a man without ideals, family or money, but must still find a way to deal with the practical daily financial realities.
Foxcatcher is saying something about people crushed by competing anachronistic systems that may overlap, but ultimately have outlived any beneficial purpose originally intended. We have a sport that existed since the beginning of time, being placed within a global competition that has pagan origins in Ancient Greece while training on property named for a 16th century British practice, but executed by Americans in a historical and cultural vacuum either out of ignorance (the wrestlers) or consciously abandoned (du Pont). All the characters have the same assumption: the Americans should be number 1. Why? If these anachronistic systems are rooted in a culture and history simultaneously abandoned and revered by them, Americans should be the last. This assumption is never questioned because it is part of another fictional, but unstated system: meritocracy. If you work hard, and you devote all your time and resources, you will be rewarded with love and accolades. Despite this vacuum, they are crushed for their hubris in competition against the gods and trapped and ripped apart like foxes. Ignorance is no protection from how the system works. Foxcatcher suggests that humanity cannot survive, and life cannot be fully lived by adhering to a system that does not care about your life. It will survive, and you will not. In these anachronistic systems, the natural world is rejected. Foxes are vermin instead of beautiful creatures. Food is not nourishing or a source of joy, but a function of whether or not it helps the wrestler make weight to be rejected or perfunctorily accepted depending on what the scale says. Of course, Foxcatcher is more than about the anachronistic systems outlined in this review, but I’ll let people like Elizabeth Warren and Robert Reich take it from there.
Foxcatcher is a real movie. You must give it your complete attention-no multitasking. Every one does an excellent job, but I don’t think that Steve Carrell had to stretch that much to play his character. du Pont is just a prosthetic Michael Scott from The Office forcing people to live in his world using whatever power he has available to him. I would highly recommend it to everyone since it pleased my mother and I, and we do not share similar tastes. An unfortunate side effect is that I still feel haunted by the film and the story. It feels like it happened now-Foxhunter is all gray and winter, melancholic and mournful.
Foxcatcher is a powerful cautionary tale. Groups of humans succeed when they share, love and create the same fantasy so leave any world where fantasies collide because one of the fantasies will be destroyed.