John du Pont after his 1996 arrest.
(AP Photo/Jim Graham)
Editor’s Note: While the film Foxcatcher is based on a widely publicized true story, anyone unfamiliar with the subject matter who hopes to remain that way prior to seeing the film may want to refrain from reading further.
It was one of the strangest sports stories of the mid 1990s.
U.S. gold medal winning wrestler and coach Dave Schultz was shot point blank on the grounds of a massive suburban Philadelphia estate in January 1996 by John E. du Pont, the multimillionaire heir of the du Pont chemical fortune who had funded a state of the art training facility for U.S. wrestlers on the estate more than eight years earlier.
By all accounts, Schultz, a beloved figure in his sport, was fixing a car radio outside his home on the estate when du Pont, whose behavior had grown increasingly erratic, approached him, asked “Do you have a problem with me?” and then shot him three times.
It’s a story that has been the subject of at least three books, the most recent coming from former gold medalist Mark Schultz, who was the first wrestler to train at the estate, known as Foxcatcher Farm, and predated his older brother’s arrival there by a year in 1986. The film Foxcatcher, which hits theaters Friday, is based largely on Mark Schultz’s story, which will be released in a book of the same name on Tuesday.
In that film, which focuses largely on the time period between Mark Schultz’s first meeting with du Pont and the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, Steve Carell gives an impressively dark performance as du Pont, while Channing Tatum portrays Mark Schultz and Mark Ruffalo appears as Dave Schultz.
The story, which Capote director Bennett Miller had been trying to bring to the big screen for eight years, well before he inherited directing duties for 2011’s Moneyball, is naturally riveting. It’s almost shocking that it never found its way into ESPN’s roster of 30 for 30 topics at some point.
As a New York profile detailing the making of the movie noted several months ago, the process of getting the movie made required multiple scripts and grueling physical demands for all three of the lead actors.
(AP Photo/Sony Pictures Classics, Scott Garfield)
For as good as Carell, Ruffalo and Tatum are in inhabiting their real-life characters, the film doesn’t do a very good job of moving the story forward, spending almost two hours building up to the 1988 Olympics before glossing over the seven and a half years between that and Dave Schultz’s murder in the film’s final ten minutes.
Much of the film is based on Mark Schultz’s story. A bulk of the plot focuses on his relationship with du Pont, one that originates with a random invitation to fund his training and grows increasingly frayed as du Pont’s behavior grows more and more eccentric.
Initially, Dave Schultz did not join his brother, but after the Seoul games, when Mark Schultz had left Team Foxcatcher, the elder Schultz remained as coach. Mark Schultz revisited that background earlier this week in a first-person interview with the New York Post.
“In 1988, I left Foxcatcher. I couldn’t look myself in the mirror and continue to work for du Pont or live on his estate,” Schultz told the paper. “That was his whole strategy in his friendships and business relationships — to see how much money people would accept from him and how much they’d compromise themselves. Even though I had nothing lined up, I had to get away from the stifling atmosphere and du Pont’s negative influences. But du Pont merely traded one Schultz brother for another.”
The ‘Foxcatcher Farms’ estate. (AP Photo/Tim Shaffer)
In the film, the screen goes momentarily dark after a shot which shows Tatum’s character driving away from the estate in a rented moving truck. When the next scene picks up, it’s winter and a group of Team Foxcatcher wrestlers are shown training in the snow. There’s no title on the screen indicating that this is now January 1996, somewhat misleading the viewer to believe that the distance between Mark Schultz’s departure and Dave Schultz’s murder was much closer.
The only indication the director gives that Carell’s du Pont has become more unhinged is to show him in his study watching a self-made documentary about himself that was made in 1988. While the film focuses so much on the increasingly uncomfortable relationship between du Pont and Mark Schultz, it never puts into perspective that Dave Schultz was affiliated with Team Foxcatcher for nearly four times as long as his brother was. There is no mention of the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona or any of the team’s accomplishments at those games.
The film paints a very vivid picture of du Pont’s unnerving personality in the team’s early years, but fails to document just how far his paranoia escalated by the mid ’90s.
“I wasn’t at the farm at the time, but I started hearing crazy stuff about him not liking black things,” Iowa State wrestling coach Kevin Jackson, a 1992 gold medalist who trained with Team Foxcatcher, told USA TODAY Sports. “He told people to get rid of his (black) jeep, told other people to get rid of all his black equipment in the weight room. Then he started kicking black athletes off the team.”
From a filmmaking perspective, the focus on Mark Schultz makes sense. It provides the narrative of the two brothers and gives a chunk of screen time to Tatum, whose involvement in the project gave the movie the star power it needed to get made.
But such focus on the team’s early years makes for a disjointed final product, especially with other notable wrestlers having joined the team during the years after Mark Schultz and telling their own tales of what they witnessed from du Pont.
Adding such context would have lengthened what is already at moments a cinematic test of endurance, but after watching the film after viewing and reading news coverage at the time, it seems like it would have been incredibly beneficial to the overall film.
Ruffalo is his usual talented self in Foxcatcher, but it’s telling that this tribute by NBC during the 1996 Olympics still gives viewers a better understanding of who Dave Schultz was.
