Foxcatcher

If Michael Scott had been born disgustingly rich, with a crooked beak for a nose, he would've been John du Pont. A lot has been made of Steve Carell's dark turn as the heir to one of the grandest fortunes in American history. But really, the actor just traded a passion for selling paper for an obsession with Olympic wrestling, and his already prominent proboscis for a bent prosthetic schnoz. He didn't even leave Pennsylvania: The sprawling du Pont family estate is only two hours south of Dunder Mifflin's Scranton office. This might seem a belabored comparison, but there's a reason Carell got the role. He understands the desperate loneliness that drove the real-life du Pont's dangerous self-delusions, because he played it for laughs for seven years. 

The difference, of course, is that unlike The Office, absolutely nothing in Foxcatcher is played for laughs. It is a brutal grind of a movie, which fits the subject matter. In 1987, du Pont contacted Mark Schultz, who'd won an Olympic gold medal three years earlier, and offered him room, board and a hefty paycheck to assemble a team of wrestlers to compete in the upcoming world championships in Seoul. Desperate and adrift, Schultz accepted. What unfolded over the next decade was so bizarre that a grayscale mood piece of the sort crafted by director Bennett Miller is the only way it would translate to the screen.  

It is an unpleasant two hours, spent with two impenetrable, broken characters. Carell's du Pont speaks in a desiccated monotone, and neither drugs nor outbursts of paranoid rage shift his unnervingly disconnected demeanor. As Schultz, Channing Tatum walks in a permanent hulking lurch. He is an inarticulate man who speaks through his athleticism, and when that fails him, all he has left is violence. Mark's brother, Dave, an equally decorated Olympian played by Mark Ruffalo, is too warm to subsist in this world, and his presence heightens rather than diffuses the film's overwhelming sense of dread.

There are moments that should register as comic relief, and that, on paper, would read like deleted scenes from The Office. Can't you imagine Michael commissioning an awkward, self-aggrandizing promotional video and nudging Jim to call him his "mentor" on camera? But Foxcatcher allows no humor to penetrate. It is a cringe comedy in which the comedy has been cringed out of existence. But it is also too intense, and too profoundly strange, not to recommend trudging through it at least once. As a visceral experience, Foxcatcher is a slow-motion suplex that, once you're in it, is hard to wriggle free of.

Critic's Grade: B

SEE IT: Foxcatcher is rated R. It opens Friday at Fox Tower.

WWeek 2015