Foxcatcher is one those films that I added to our to-watch list out of a sense of duty since it earned multiple Academy Award nominations and showed up on several critics’ lists of the best films of 2014. I’d heard that it was based on a true story and had some vague idea that it was about wrestling but since I don’t much care for sports I didn’t really think much about it and simply thought that it was just another sports biopic. Boy, was I wrong.

Channing Tatum plays Mark Schultz, an Olympic wrestling champion who has fallen on hard times without adequate support being provided for his training for the upcoming World Championship. Out of the blue, he receives a phone call inviting him to meet the wealthy John Du Pont, played by Steve Carell. Du Pont professes to be both a patriot and a fan of the sport of wrestling, and asks Schultz to join his team, named Foxcatcher after the farm it is based in, where he will have access to extensive facilities and be paid to train. After consulting his brother Dave who is also a wrestling champion, Mark accepts and moves to Foxcatcher, but it soon becomes clear that Du Pont knows next to nothing about wrestling and is only spending money to flatter his own ego.

To be honest, it does feel like a bit of a bait and switch as Foxcatcher isn’t about wrestling at all or even about Mark Schultz. It’s really about the madness of Du Pont as seen by Mark and later by Dave when he is also persuaded to move to Foxcatcher. Gradually and indirectly, the film paints a very unflattering portrait of Du Pont, a man-child who grew up without any friends under the domineering control of his mother. When Mark moves in and sets up the wrestling team, we can see how everyone are sycophants who value him only for his money, cheering him on and letting him win when they play-wrestle. Mark eventually realizes that he is nothing more than a fancy pet for Du Pont, which trots out at fancy dinners to introduce to other rich people as an Olympic medalist. He’s even assigned prepared speeches in which he has to laud Du Pont as a mentor and a father figure.

It does also cover key points of Mark’s wrestling career while he is in the Foxcatcher program but honestly those are the least interesting bits. That’s why I find the film somewhat unsatisfying as the psychology of Du Pont is what makes this story so fascinating, yet here we only see him as a somewhat distant figure, presumably the primary source here in Mark’s memoir. I would have loved to see more of Du Pont’s interactions with people other than those in his wrestling team or more of the childhood experiences that shaped, but only vague hints of these aspects of Du Pont’s life is present in this film, such as how even the police and the US military bend over backwards to please him.

The performances at least are fantastic all around with Mark Ruffalo as Dave Schultz being especially noteworthy. It’s impressive how the actors manage to mimic mannerisms, the way they hang their hands in the air, the way they amble when they walk, that show that they are wrestlers. My wife also amusingly wondered whether Carell deliberately held his head up high to look at people or if this angle was necessitated by the facial prosthetic that emphasizes his nose, making him almost unrecognizable here.

I only realized after finishing this that it was directed by Bennett Miller, which means that we’ve now watched all three of the most prominent works by this director. Foxcatcher is a good film and is well worth watching, but it’s probably the weakest of the three films with Capote still being the best.