Film Review: Foxcatcher

Rating:

Directed by Bennett Miller, Foxcatcher tells the peculiar true story of the greatest Olympic Wrestling Champion brother team, Mark (Channing Tatum) and David Schultz (Mark Ruffalo). As they train for the 1988 games in Seoul, the brothers join Team Foxcatcher, led by multimillionaire sponsor John du Pont (Steve Carell), in hope of receiving the best training and to change the face of wrestling as an Olympic sport. But their union isn’t quite as innocent as it once seemed, with the brothers’ suspicious union with Du Pont leading to unlikely circumstances.

Foxcatcher is a chilling thriller that really gets under your skin. From the trailer alone you know that this is no ordinary story and the ghost of not knowing what could all go so wrong haunts you until the very end.

I’m half tempted to give Foxcatcher 4.5 stars because it had such a chilling after effect, and the suspense was there constantly. But there were too many times that I was waiting for something more to happen or for a scene to be hurried through. Foxcatcher loses this 0.5 of a star for its central scenes, many of them unnecessary or just unnecessarily long, when the real focus should have been on the aftermath of the ‘twist’.

It was obvious that something big was going to happen, but there’s so much build up the to the event that we were left with very little time to see what this meant for everybody involved. In the real-life story, it took two days for Du Pont to be captured. With so much emphasis on his character, I think this is something that we needed to see. Having more focus on the after events would have made this an even more disturbing film to watch, but it would have worked in its favour massively.

Aside from my few personal disappointments, one thing that we can all agree on is the outstanding performances from its three central leads. Tatum and Ruffalo are phenomenal as the Schultz brothers, but its Carell’s role that gives the audience the shivers. All three are cast perfectly making Foxcatcher a performance-driven film based on a transfixing character-driven story.