Miller: Foxcatcher (2014)

Carved out of dull gloom, Bennett Miller’s extraordinary third film is based on the true story of John DuPont (Steve Carell), heir to the DuPont fortune, and his relationship with Olympic wrestlers Mark and Dave Schultz (Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo), whom he invited to his wrestling facility at Foxcatcher Farms in the early 80s to provide them with the support that he felt they weren't receiving from the American government. For the most part, the film revolves around what, exactly, DuPont feels this support entails, and the way in which he offers it, impressing upon Mark in particular that athletes need to be trained and honoured as soldiers, and that sport, especially international sport, needs to be recognised and remunerated as combat. That might sound like quite an extroverted premise, but Carell’s incredible performance plays more like an extension of the gloomy recesses of Foxcatcher than a character in itself, which resemble Miller's own atmospheric architecture in their elegant functionality, radiating a stately industrial opulence that is irreducibly American, the ambience of a self-made mansion with a gymnasium at its core. Even at his most present and embodied moments, you never shake the sense that DuPont is somehow channelling the shadowy American capital lurking behind him - he was the richest man in the country at this time - into a kind of dark doppelganger to American philanthropy, collecting Olympic medals and specimens of American manhood in the same way that he collects ammunition and artillery, while desperately hoping that the upcoming Seoul Olympics will offer a Cold War battlefield where some kind of real combat will occur, even as the film freezes the Cold War tighter and tighter with each scene, dissociating Mark's militaristic preparations from anything other than DuPont's remote, insulating gaze. Against that incredible performance, or presence, Tatum acts with his body as never before, never quite unclenching or relaxing it, and extrapolating everything from his wrestling and warmup sequences, even or especially his quietest and most intimate moments with DuPont. As might be expected, that creates a strong homoerotic vibe in a film otherwise entirely devoid of romance, but it’s not exactly that Bennett shoots wrestling as sex so much as that he parches and denudes the film with the kind of austere oblivion that comes from wilfully ignoring that wrestling could have anything to do with sex, to the point where it often feels as if we’re witnessing the emergence of a new Republican ideal of sport, a new muscular artillery that’s prepared to do the most outrageously and transparently homosexual things just to prove how categorically it’s excluded that very possibility. By the time the American Wrestling Association agrees to make Foxcatcher its base, it's clear that DuPont's managed to extend his family's monopoly on munitions into the flesh trade, grooming the future of American manhood with a quiet, eerie confidence that he's going to succeed - and the film insulates and cushions even his most unhinged and insane moments in that confidence, until it feels as if Miller is finally tracing out the contours of his privacy rather than his character itself, impervious to everything posterity might attempt to puncture or penetrate it.