Bennett Miller (2014)
Bennett Miller’s first dramatic feature, Capote (2005), was based on events surrounding a murder which really happened. His second film, Moneyball (2011), centred on actual sporting history. His latest is a combination of the two. In an interview at the recent New York Film Festival, Miller explained what drew him to the true story which forms the basis of Foxcatcher:
‘I thought it was funny. … the absurdity – the dark, comic absurdity of one of the wealthiest men in America bringing a team of wrestlers onto his estate to train … and he’d become their coach, without knowing anything about wrestling. It was funny, except that the outcome was horrible …’
In January 1996, the rich man in this story, John Eleuthère du Pont, shot dead the Olympic champion wrestler, Dave Schultz. The motive for the crime remains uncertain and looks set to stay that way. Du Pont, who unsuccessfully pleaded ‘not guilty by reason of insanity’ (the jury’s verdict was ‘guilty but mentally ill’), died in prison in 2010. In a documentary about this kind of subject, it would be standard practice to collect from those who knew the killer their theories as to why he killed. Dramatising an unsolved and probably insoluble crime mystery presents a larger challenge and a dilemma for the director: do you stay true to the facts as they’re known and run the risk of frustrating the audience or do you tidily explain things and, in doing so, oversimplify or falsify the story? Bennett Miller and the writers of Foxcatcher – Dan Futterman (who also wrote Capote) and E Max Frye – try to steer a course between a purely behavioural treatment and a crassly psychoanalytical approach. The result is finally disappointing but the attempt makes fascinating viewing.
Dave Schultz, born in California in 1959, and his year younger brother Mark didn’t have an easy childhood. Their biological father soon departed the scene; their mother had other partners (and two more children) but the boys’ upbringing was unsettled. Both won freestyle wrestling golds at the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984. This was in the absence of the Eastern bloc countries, traditionally strong in the sport, but Dave had taken gold in the world championships the previous year. Mark emulated him in 1985 and won a second world gold in 1987. After fighting unsuccessfully in the Seoul Olympics of 1988, Mark Schultz retired from amateur wrestling but Dave continued in competition, in combination with coaching. He won silver in the world championships of 1993 and, at the time he lost his life, was coaching the private ‘Team Foxcatcher’ squad, in preparation for the 1996 Olympic trials, at John du Pont’s training centre in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania. The du Pont family made their fortune in the nineteenth century through the manufacture of gunpowder. According to Wikipedia (although the statement doesn’t have a substantiating reference), du Pont Chemicals and other companies run by the family to this day ‘employ some five to ten percent of Delaware’s population’. William du Pont, John’s father, married Jean Liseter Austin in 1919. They developed a horse farm and established a large racing stable in the 1920s; their horses ran in the name of Foxcatcher Farm. John du Pont was born in 1938, the youngest of four children. His parents divorced when he was only two years old. John continued to live on the family estate with his mother after his older siblings had grown up and gone elsewhere. His marriage, in 1983, to a therapist, was annulled after ninety days.
The training centre where Team Foxcatcher was based was set up by John du Pont following his mother’s death in 1988. Although he was passionate about wrestling in particular, du Pont was a major sponsor of other amateur sports – athletics, swimming and modern pentathlon. ((William du Pont’s sister, Marion du Pont Scott, is a famous name in American steeplechasing and best known in this country as the owner of the 1938 Grand National winner, Battleship. William’s second wife was Margaret Osborne, winner of six tennis Grand Slam singles titles, including Wimbledon in 1947, and thirty-one Grand Slam doubles titles: all in all, the extended du Pont family covers a lot of sporting ground …) After an undergraduate degree in zoology at the University of Miami, John du Pont successfully completed doctoral studies in natural science at Villanova University, a private institution in Philadelphia. He subsequently wrote several books on birds of the Philippines and South Pacific, to where he’d travelled on scientific expeditions that he took part in during his graduate studies. He was also an enthusiastic stamp collector: according to Wikipedia, du Pont, ‘[in] a 1980 auction, while bidding anonymously, … paid $935,000 for one of the rarest stamps in the world, the British Guiana 1856 1c black on magenta’.
In order to give Foxcatcher a clear dramatic shape and focus, Dan Futterman and E Max Frye have worked these biographical facts into the script in combination with a characterisation of John du Pont as pathologically mother-ridden, a repressed homosexual, and an eccentric loner with more money than sanity and a desire to own people as well as property. This characterisation, although speculative, is easy enough to infer from a Google search of du Pont. The film also suggests that Team Foxcatcher developed from du Pont’s obsession with Mark Schultz and constructs a motif of absent fathers and surrogate father figures. None of du Pont, Mark or Dave Schultz has known a father as a stable male influence in their life; Dave Schultz, in spite of the brothers’ close proximity in age, is presented as having always been Mark’s mainstay; du Pont’s intervention introduces a new, weird paternalistic force into the mix. To tighten the storyline, Bennett Miller relies on a chronology very different from the actual sequence of events. Mark Schultz first receives an invitation to visit du Pont on his estate in early 1987 and moves into accommodation there to prepare for that season’s world championships. Dave Schultz has a wife and two young children: although he’s helped to coach Mark until now, he doesn’t want to interrupt his happy family life and at first refuses du Pont’s invitation to join his brother on the estate. Dave eventually agrees to move in early 1988, by which time du Pont’s training centre is operating, with the US Olympic trials the first main target for the wrestlers in Team Foxcatcher. (It’s during these trials that du Pont’s mother dies.) When the brothers return from the Seoul Olympics, Mark is evicted from the estate but Dave and his family continue to live there. It’s not clear how long after this that Dave is killed. In terms of screen time, it’s very shortly after Mark’s unsuccessful Olympic bid.
The first hour of Foxcatcher is entirely and variously absorbing. The film opens with home movie footage of a fox hunt on the du Pont estate, in which John participated as a boy. (The footage came into Bennett Miller’s hands courtesy of one of du Pont’s former employees. In Foxcatcher, he’s the man who records interviews with John du Pont and Dave Schultz, to be used as promotional material for Team Foxcatcher.) Miller cuts from this ominous footage of the wealthy at play (it includes shots of a fox trying to flee the hunters) to Mark Schultz, nervously preparing to give a talk to schoolchildren about what it means to be an Olympic champion – a talk which will earn him a few dollars for expenses but, as an amateur, no real fee. We then watch Mark and Dave in a training session, in a dingy, empty hall. Outside the professional No-Holds-Barred circuit, wrestling is not a high-profile sport in America: Miller’s description of the unglamorous life of a hard-up Olympic champion is something I don’t recall seeing on film before. Channing Tatum (Mark) and Mark Ruffalo (Dave) trained for the film’s wrestling sequences for several months but this opening training session is the best: as the brothers move from loosening up exercises to actual holds and throws, you get a sense of the intense physical contact between wrestlers – a quality that keeps reverberating in your mind once John du Pont enters the story. It’s uncanny how soon and how strongly the locations in Foxcatcher impose themselves (the cinematographer is Greig Fraser; the production designer is the brilliant Jess Gonchor). This is true of the glumly functional, green and dun-coloured training venue at the start (and where Dave Schultz continues to be based for some time in the story). It’s equally true of the key locations on the du Pont estate – the library, the trophy room, the chalet where Mark stays. Each of them reflects a different shade of prosperous emptiness.
Miller builds up audience curiosity by delaying the arrival on the screen of John du Pont: Steve Carell’s first appearance is, to put it mildly, worth waiting for. In their first meeting, in the library of the family mansion, John du Pont and Mark Schultz sit a few feet apart but Carell does something remarkable: he seems to be talking from a million miles away. In his white short-sleeved shirt, navy blue trousers and white trainers, du Pont’s body is amorphous. He’s not overweight but his pale, greyish forearms and face suggest an accretion of flesh over the years which has sealed his isolation. His dead, unblinking eyes look at Mark Schultz as if from another world. (Carell’s make-up was designed by Bill Corso.) As his interest in Mark increases, Steve Carell makes du Pont’s combination of possessiveness and remoteness intriguing. His magnetism sustains Foxcatcher for some time but his taking over as the centre of attention turns out to be a mixed blessing. There’s been speculation over the last year or more – filming was completed in early 2013 and Foxcatcher was originally scheduled for release last December – about whether Carell will be campaigned for Best Actor or Best Supporting Actor awards. (This is reminiscent of a similar debate around another interpretation of a creepy killer which, although it didn’t occupy the most screen time, came to dominate a film: Anthony Hopkins’s Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs in 1991. In fact, I think Carell is unlikely to win in either category: Hopkins’s rapt, sensual eeriness was spellbinding in a reassuringly theatrical way. Besides, a real-life killer is likely to be a more troubling proposition for Academy members than a fictional creation.)
By the end of Foxcatcher, you feel that John du Pont has been on screen longer than anyone else. This may be intentional but I began to wonder if Bennett Miller realised that Carell was compelling but feared that Channing Tatum’s Mark Schultz wasn’t. Tatum has developed a convincing gait for the role – like Matthias Schoenaerts in Bullhead, he looks at risk of toppling over under the weight of his own musculature. Tatum occasionally make Mark Schultz’s uncertainty touching but he’s excessively Neanderthal. He suggests someone who’s not just slow of speech but pretty thick. (Interviewed by one of du Pont’s staff early on, Mark says he graduated from the University of Oklahoma; he was presumably on a sporting scholarship there but he must have had some academic ability.) Channing Tatum isn’t helped by the fact that the script makes Mark Schultz improbably isolated. When he’s told by du Pont that the latter had only one childhood pal and discovered later that his mother had paid the boy’s father so that his son would be friends with John, Mark replies that his brother Dave was his only friend when he was growing up. There’s no evidence in the film to suggest otherwise – or of Mark’s having a girlfriend before du Pont takes him over. Mark appears to have no kind of companionship with other members of Team Foxcatcher.
Although the script depends structurally on a particular reading of John du Pont’s personality and drives, Bennett Miller is wary of putting psychological explication on screen. In answer to a question from the audience at the New York Film Festival session, Miller said:
‘The film very much doesn’t want to wave its finger at the audience and conclude anything … rather … keep staring at these things that tempt us to react, to conclude, to label, to designate what’s good and evil … you make a film like this, you’re very tempted towards the low-hanging fruit … but that’s cheap … [I wanted] to restrain from that [sic] and say, OK, what’s behind that and what’s behind that …’
Miller goes some way towards achieving these aims. His camera often does keep staring at Carell, Tatum, Ruffalo and Vanessa Redgrave, in the small but crucial role of du Pont’s mother. Each of these actors shows a mind working behind the face you’re watching (even if Mark Schultz’s mind is working very slowly). Only rarely does any of the four characters speak their mind or psychologise someone else. The ‘restraint’ on Miller’s part puts the onus on the viewer to read the characters. I’m not convinced, though, that this adds up to the director’s exploring ‘what’s behind’ the behaviour he describes. After a while, this viewer felt that he was watching resourceful actors rather than getting inside complex characters. (Since Dave Schultz is a relatively open, straightforward man, Mark Ruffalo deserves particular praise for keeping you absorbed in this way but staying in character.) Miller said at NYFF that making things explicit tended to ‘erase the allegory’: but what is the allegory of Foxcatcher? John du Pont claims in the PR film for Team Foxcatcher that, as a sporting coach and sponsor, ‘I am leading men and I am giving America hope’ but this vainglorious claptrap fools no one but himself. And although Miller also said in the NYFF interview that class and wealth were important themes in the story, du Pont is too bizarre to be in any way representative. Bennett Miller’s professed eschewal of forcing the material is a bit disingenuous: the storyline the film follows is based on John du Pont’s infatuation with Mark Schultz – an infatuation that appears to have been invented for the sake of a definite narrative. When, under du Pont’s influence, Mark gets his hair styled and starts doing drugs, Foxcatcher is teetering on the edge of Behind the Candelabra territory. The fact that Miller then steps back from the edge seems less a case of artistic high-mindedness than a failure to follow things through.
That becomes a recurring issue in the film. During the Olympic trials in 1988, Mark loses his first match and promptly has a meltdown in his room: his gargantuan, high-speed binge means that, when Dave arrives to sort things out, Mark is twelve pounds over the legal limit with less than an hour to go before his next match: equally violent and rapid exercise is enough to shed the excess weight. None of this seems believable. What’s more unsatisfactory is that the episode is never mentioned subsequently – you can’t help feeling that, whether or not it was based on fact, Miller included it for the sake of the spectacular eating, vomiting and sweating off the poundage involved. When Mrs du Pont dies, her son opens the stable doors and sets his mother’s beloved and no doubt highly valuable bloodstock free to wander off. The image of du Pont urging the horses to leave the stables is arresting, even if too determinedly poetic, but not only is it not clear whether the animals do run away; no one comments on this new level of odd behaviour on the part of du Pont. As I understand it, Mark Schultz retired from amateur wrestling before his brother went to work for John du Pont. It’s understandable that the real chronology has been greatly changed to accommodate championship wrestling involving Mark but Miller is surprisingly careless in presenting some of this action. (It’s particularly surprising from the man who made Moneyball.) In the Olympic trials section, when Mark loses his first match, Dave reassures him that it’s ‘best of three’. After the binge etc, Mark is seen in one more bout – against a different wrestler, whom he defeats. This single win is enough for Mark to get into the US Olympic team. Even allowing that wrestling is a minnow in the American sporting pond, it’s surprising that the sport’s governing body, in an OIympic year, appears to have no interest in du Pont’s operations until he offers them a $500,000 annual donation in exchange for allowing Newtown Square to become wrestling’s national training centre.
Sometimes, Miller’s determination to avoid the obvious is clearly in evidence and pays off. Mark accompanies du Pont to a banquet at which the young man is to make a speech, singing the praises of his new father figure. Flying to the event in his private plane, du Pont runs the unconfident Mark through his lines and invites him, for the first time, to try cocaine – to calm his nerves. The two men, getting high, chant together the opening words of the speech, ‘Ornithologist, philanthropist, philatelist …’ You expect to hear the start of the speech at the dinner (and almost expect a Luca Brasi-like stumble from Mark). Miller moves to a different point of the eulogy instead – he rightly judges that he’s already got enough out of the ornithologist-philanthropist-philatelist mantra. The casting of Steve Carell as du Pont is shrewdly imaginative: there are times when you need someone with Carell’s comic expertise to get the full sinister craziness out of what du Pont is saying. That exchange en route to the banquet is one example. Another is when du Pont tells Mark that he doesn’t want to be addressed as ‘Sir’ or ‘Mr du Pont’ any more – that ‘I consider us friends – most of my friends call me Eagle or Golden Eagle … or John’. (The tiny pause before ‘Eagle’ and the longer one before ‘or John’ are perfectly timed.)
It’s frustrating that Miller omits any description of day-to-day relationships among the wrestlers in Team Foxcatcher. These are close to non-speaking parts and you get no sense of what the other men think of Mark’s being du Pont’s favourite. There are nevertheless two especially strong sequences that dramatise economically and trenchantly du Pont’s relationship with the team. At a party in the family trophy room to celebrate recent success, du Pont pretends to faint so that, when one of the men kneels to check he’s OK, du Pont can wrestle him to the ground and enjoy some horseplay. Miller rhymes most effectively with this a moment when du Pont is out on the estate clay pigeon shooting with three older men. He’s wearing his Team Foxcatcher tracksuit and, as the wrestlers go by on a training run, they call out joshingly to Coach du Pont. We’ve not heard any of the men, even in private, mention his weirdness but it’s as if, moving at speed, en masse and with physical distance between themselves and du Pont, they can afford to make fun of him. In spite of that distance, he is unsmiling and evidently thinks they’re getting too close for comfort. He joins the team when they’ve returned for a gym session, announces that the countdown to Seoul Olympics starts here, and alarmingly fires a pistol into the ceiling by way of confirmation.
The score by Rob Simonsen and Mychael Danna is nuanced. Dan Futterman’s and E Max Frye’s dialogue is consistently excellent, as is the casting and playing of the smaller parts: Sienna Miller is particularly good as Dave Schultz’s wifeGall. Individual scenes are often impressive and the film does express Bennett Miller’s view that the story he’s telling is ‘funny … until it’s not funny’. But Foxcatcher doesn’t really deepen or build and its slowness, which at first is part of what draws you in, becomes annoying as a result. You’re waiting a long time for whatever’s inside John du Pont to explode and the lack of clarity as to how much time has passed between the departure of Mark Schultz and the murder of Dave makes the film’s climax particularly unsatisfying since it further obfuscates the motive for the killing. If du Pont is obsessed with Mark, how does he do without him – or does Mark’s failure at Seoul dispel the obsession? (There’s no suggestion in the film that du Pont becomes preoccupied with other wrestlers, although it’s worth noting that the real John du Pont left eighty per cent of his estate to a Bulgarian wrestler, Valentin Yordanov, who added a gold at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta to numerous world championships.) What kind of relationship has du Pont had with Dave Schultz since Mark departed the scene?
It’s watching the promotional video for Team Foxcatcher that appears to prompt du Pont to drive through snow with his security chief (in real life, some have blamed du Pont’s increasing paranoia on the influence of this security man) to the house on his estate where the Schultzes live and to pull a gun on Dave. The shooting – even if you know it’s coming – is upsetting. Partly because this is the only such act of violence in Foxcatcher and partly because Mark Ruffalo has made Dave such a likeable character, the human details register strongly. (You notice things like the texture of the sweaters that Dave and his wife, as she bends over his body, are wearing – the tears in the wool of his that the bullet holes have made, the ribbing on hers.) Just before he pulls the trigger, du Pont asks Dave, ‘Do you have a problem with me?’ But you never know what du Pont’s problem is with Dave. (Does he think, in retrospect, that Dave’s joining Team Foxcatcher destroyed du Pont’s special relationship with Mark? Does he envy Dave because du Pont, although he created divisions between the brothers, could never get as close to Mark as Dave naturally was? Does he hate Dave because he’s his own man, and a happy one?) In principle, you applaud the film-makers’ determination to avoid easy explanations but the fundamental problem with Foxcatcher is that they play fast and loose with this principle. They explain what’s driving and eating at John du Pont in order to set up and propel the drama (and change facts and chronology in order to do so). They then ignore the implications of having played their hand in this way. In one sense, it’s refreshing that the killing of Dave Schultz doesn’t have predictable dramatic consequences. There’s no scene of the news being broken to Mark, no police interview or court proceedings. Yet the end of Foxcatcher reinforces what has to come to seem like willed opacity on the part of Bennett Miller.
17 October 2014
