Critics reviews

Today, Foxcatcher strikes me as one of the few important Hollywood films of the last season for its analytical vision and its sense of the repression associated with wealth and power in America.

The 134-minute film is paced slowly but steadily: I looked at my watch thinking that an hour passed, but it was almost over. Yet Miller and [his] screenwriters... don't seem particularly interested in wrestling as a sport, just as a pretext to mount a glum reverie about the death of the American dream, as it plays out for John and Mark — if that's indeed what Foxcatcher is about. It insinuates a lot about those ideals and their decline, but it doesn't have anything clear to say about them.

Had an extremely rich (though not exactly famous) man not been at the center of this nightmare, it's unlikely that anyone would remember it, especially since the cause-and-effect relationship screenwriters Dan Futterman and E. Max Frye concoct between the Olympics and the murder is wholly invented.

...Possibly because the characters are freed up in this way, the drama of the story is slightly streamlined and signposted, with music highlighting ominous moments – I register this as a bit of a limitation. But the film was admirably realized throughout, with no real false steps. Four wonderful performances from the leads – ensemble films like this and THE MONUMENTS MEN make me feel the US is still probably the world's best repository of screen acting, for filmmakers who can exploit it.

The filmmakers tell us neither who these characters are nor why they behave as they do... The approach in Foxcatcher begs to be taken seriously. It treats distance as a virtue, and it's tempting to be seduced by that. The movie is handsome and the acting is strong, especially by Ruffalo, who invests a wispy part with so much salt of the earth, he makes you thirsty. But there's a hollowness here, too, that speaks to a lack of audacity.

Foxcatcher" is about wrestlers, but it's equally, and overtly, about money and the American way of financing—about who pays for the expensive beautiful things... "Foxcatcher," [in contrast to the story of the film's financier, Megan Ellison], is the story of an independent producer as antihero, a monster who arises to fulfill a need and who preys upon those in need.

What results is the kind of movie Hollywood gets criticized for no longer making, a reserved, pleasantly adult accounting of battles both physical and mental, with tensions exposed through sudden actions and quiet gestures, free from dumb explanatory scenes or showstopper moments. Yet Foxcatcher is also far from perfect, with an oppressive air of overbearing somberness only minimally offset by some moments of genuine humor.

Leaving aside his Cannes prize for mise en scène, Miller isn't exactly a director with an arsenal of visual strategies: he's into grey, underlit interiors and languid but still conventional continuity editing, and that's about it. But he hits paydirt with in this gently elongated and elegantly choreographed pas de deux, which instantly establishes both the connection and the competitiveness between the Schultzes.

On a second viewing, Foxcatcher felt a lot more focused and coherent, and I appreciated the film's qualities more. And yet conversely, it become slightly less intriguing: once you know the specific incident that's coming, Foxcatcher becomes a coherent, outcome-focused true-life drama, whereas if you don't, then it's something oddly fragmented and perplexing, and certainly the damnedest sports movie you've ever seen. I'm glad I got to see both versions, if you see what I mean.

Miller imparts information visually more often than verbally. It helps to have as your DP someone of the caliber of Aussie Greig Fraser (Zero Dark Thirty, Bright Star), equally at home indoors and out. A cinematographer on some of his own earlier projects, Miller makes certain the camera lingers longer, at least proportionally, on the faces of his principals than in other contemporary Hollywood films.

Parts of it evoke films by the late Alan J. Pakula ("All the President's Men," "The Parallax View," "Comes a Horseman"), a master of understatement. And yet in the end "Foxcatcher" proves impossible to embrace because of fundamental miscalculations in performance, direction and makeup, along with a certain clumsiness in the way that it tries to make some kind of grand statement about American values, or the lack thereof.

It's rare to see such physical male intimacy on screen, especially among men not bonded by war. And it's in the depictions of this intimacy, in its tangle of bodies and desires — the images of John squirming on top of and below other men say more than any of his pitiful speeches — that "Foxcatcher" rises to the occasion of real tragedy.