By: Cynthia Ayala

❝When Olympic Gold Medal winning wrestler Mark Schultz is invited by wealthy heir John du Pont to move on to the du Pont estate and help form a team to train for the 1988 Seoul Olympics, Schultz jumps at the opportunity, hoping to focus on his training and finally step out of the shadow of his revered brother, Dave. Flattered by the attention and entranced by du Pont’s majestic world, Mark comes to see his benefactor as a father figure and grows increasingly dependent on him for approval. Though initially supportive, du Pont’s mercurial personality turns and he begins to lure Mark into an unhealthy lifestyle that threatens to undermine his training. Soon du Pont’s erratic behavior and cruel psychological game-play begin to erode the athlete’s already shaky self-esteem.❞

• Synopsis provided by Regal Cinemas Online
  

Steve Carell, Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo make a brilliant trio.

Foxcatcher is a story circling around actual events about an Olympic Athlete and his brother and the attention and the relationship they built with wrestling enthusiast and multimillionaire du Pont family heir John E. du Pont.

The movie was brilliant. What was so great was seeing Steve Carell taking on such a serious and sad role. He is a brilliant actor who captured the unstable mind of du Pont. There was something there, the desperation that surrounded who this person was and his controlling nature. Steven Carell took the time to study and understand who this person was in real life. He pushed himself onto others, inflicted pain onto others creating dependent relationships where he had all the power.

There is no doubt about the acting; it was provoking, dangerous and well done. These three actors really outdid themselves with these parts, building the chemistry between their parts and the strong dynamics. But the structure of the film, needed some work.

Overall, the structure of the film was good, but there was a lot of slow moments within the film that dragged out the plot of the story without adding anything to the film. There were times when the relationship wasn’t really built between the characters and nearing the end of the film, the acting aside, the progression of the story left room and scenes out of the story that could have made the relationship between the characters easier to understand. Not a lot goes into explaining the strain between the characters and it really requires the audience to see between the lines and study the characters as well as their actions. Now, while that isn’t a bad thing, it does diminish some of the appeal this movie has for the general audience. Which is unfortunate because this was a very god movie focusing ono actual events. There is a story here that is being told in honor of Dave Schultz and no one is doubting the effort the storytellers put into telling this story, but there could have been more done in writing this film because much of the relationships are well structured, but more time needed to be devoted to exploring these relationships because there was more devoted to Mark and John than there was to John and Dave.

Other than that, these actors were amazing. They were so completely and perfectly amazing in how they actually built up the film. The only problem was the slow progression of the film and the scene structures. (★★★☆ | A-)

– Film Credits –

Directed by: Bennett Miller

Written by: E. Max Frye & Dan Futterman

Starring: Steve Carell, Channing Tatum, Mark Rufallo & Vanessa Redgrave

Genre | Rating | Length: Docudrama, Crime drama | R | 2 hr. 14 min.