Foxcatcher

Wrestling, singlets… and a deliriously large prosthetic nose. Perhaps not the most likely ingredients for a film tipped to pick up an Academy Award or two. And yet there is something spookily, strangely, sadly compelling about this tale of a bonkers billionaire whose obsession with men grappling one another leads him to a state of murderous paranoia.

Remarkably, Foxcatcher is based on a true story. I say remarkably because you really couldn’t make it up. Not because it features time travel, ghouls or a Gordian plot twist, but simply because it reminds us just how weird some people can be.

John E du Pont, played by Steve Carell (and his prosthetic nose) is late-20th-century America’s answer to Tolkien’s Smaug, a stupendously rich but humourless reptile living the solitary life in his very own Philadelphia Main Line Lonely Mountain: 800-acre Foxcatcher Farm. He birdwatches. He receives uncomfortable and humiliating visits from his wheelchair-bound mother (Vanessa Redgrave). He birdwatches some more. But he also loves wrestling – perhaps a little too much.

And so his beady eyes come to rest on 1984 Olympic gold-medal winning brothers Mark (Channing Tatum) and Dave (the ever-likeable Mark Ruffalo) Schultz. Younger, weaker brother Mark, in particular, is hardly living the life of the all-American hero. He subsists in a dreary apartment, spending his evenings alone, eating TV dinners and playing Pac-Man – pick your sport more carefully if you want your nation’s adoration.

John, however, has bigger ideas and creepily invites Mark to train at his Foxcatcher wrestling facility, housed in the type of place only bad things happen. Mark is stupid or desperate or both, though, and is seduced by the tycoon’s promise of riches and further Olympic glory.

For a while, the good times roll. Mark wins the World Championships and flies around in helicopters. Du Pont gets to be the ‘Big Daddy’. Before long, Dave is on the show, too. All is almost well. Until…

I won’t reveal more, but then plot isn’t central to director Bennet Miller’s film anyway. It’s about character. Playing against type, comedian Steve Carell excels as the WASP Ozymandias – an empty vessel who endlessly window shops for love and admiration, the only two things he can’t write a cheque for. His proboscis may win the Oscar yet.

Tatum, meanwhile, captures perfectly the apish, jealous and malleable melancholic who tries to step out of his older brother’s shadow only to become the puppet of a new master.

It’s when Carell and Tatum are on screen together, however, that the film really finds its stride; they’re a double act so odd, so uncomfortable, so sinister that you can’t help but watch.

On the downside, Foxcatcher is gloomy, overlong and largely about wrestling. But at a time when many films cross galaxies and employ endless special effects to draw audiences, this dares simply to be a movie about people. And that deserves applause.