Murder, madness and glory

Foxcatcher is a three-character drama done with exceptional sharpness and power. Based on actual events from the 1980s, it portrays the tragic entanglement of two Olympic wrestlers, the brothers Dave and Mark Schultz, with an immensely wealthy and very peculiar scion of the du Pont dynasty.

As scripted by E. Max Frye and Dan Futterman, the story is a kind of case study in which a toxic brew of privileged wealth, facile patriotism, twisted family ties, and repressed sexuality engulfs all three. Director Bennett Miller gets finely nuanced performances out of the three principal actors—Channing Tatum as Mark Schultz, Mark Ruffalo as older brother Dave, and a heavily made-up Steve Carell as the bizarre John E. du Pont.

To their credit, Miller and company draw no easy conclusions from all these hot-button issues. Carell’s du Pont might seem an obviously suitable case for treatment, but one of the film’s ironies has to do with the ways in which various beneficiaries of his wealth and power turn a blind eye to his increasingly creepy eccentricities.

Carell’s performance is judiciously eccentric as well, and all three of the principals use deft touches of stylized exaggeration in their physical bearing. Bennett works out a visual theme-and-variation on motifs of physical contact from the early wrestling action, and that diverse succession of moments—men touching, grabbing, embracing, wrestling, getting a grip—becomes a particularly rich and complex element of the unfolding drama.