The Eagle has Crash Landed

Rating: 7/10 (30 November 2014)

Greetings again from the darkness. The 1996 newscast remains vivid in my mind. It was captivating due to the bizarre circumstances and the tragedy involving an athlete whose Olympic career I had followed closely. Initially, I had trouble reconciling the story of this popular world class athlete and the mentally troubled billionaire who was part of one of America's richest and most iconic families. This movie fills in some of the gaps.
Director Bennett Miller (Capote, Moneyball) is a meticulous filmmaker and is never in a hurry as a story teller. He allows the characters to develop on screen at their own pace ... and this time the pace is excruciatingly slow - in a brilliant, yet painful to watch manner. The lead characters are a diverse trio of men. Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum) won Olympic Gold in 1984, but he is shy and withdrawn to the point of being socially awkward and unable to capitalize on his victory. His older brother Dave Schultz (Mark Ruffalo) also won a Gold Medal in 1984, and is very engaging family man who helped raise Mark, while building endorsements and job opportunities for himself. The triumvirate is completed by the incredibly odd billionaire John DuPont (Steve Carell), who proclaims himself a wrestling coach after building a state of the art training facility on his family estate. The ultra rich can do such things.
John DuPont was never able to live up to his mother's (Vanessa Redgrave) standards. She even paid the chauffeur's son to be John's friend as they were growing up. With Mark always in the shadow of his more popular brother, DuPont seizes the opportunity to capitalize on Mark's vulnerability and invite him to lead his Foxcatcher wrestling team (named after the estate which is near Valley Forge). DuPont's ultimate goal is to also have Dave join them, but it's a tougher sell for various reasons.
The mommy issues and brother issues drive the need for validation and are at the core of story here, as are ego, "patriotism", and ultimately delusion. Steve Carell sports a nose apparatus that captures the reason DuPont nicknamed himself the "eagle". He also kicks his head back, while slumping his shoulders, in physically capturing DuPont's unorthodox movements. But that's nothing compared to the eerie aura he puts off whenever he must deal with another person. He sends up red flags to anyone even minimally aware of their surroundings, but to a lost soul like Mark, he becomes a father figure and "coach".
A wrestling movie would figure to be male dominated, but even with that, Sienna Miller (as Dave's wife) and Vanessa Redgrave (as Jean DuPont) are almost non-existent as the only female characters. Anthony Michael Hall has a brief supporting role, and it's nice to see Guy Boyd back on screen as well. However, most every scene is some mixture of Carell, Tatum and Ruffalo, and they each deliver. It's a side of Carell we have never before seen (many of the greatest comics have a dark side), and Tatum is spot on as the hulking, sulking Mark, while Ruffalo captures the easy charm and sensitivity of Dave.
The story offers further proof that life can be stranger than fiction ... especially when it involves an insecure and mentally unstable billionaire who envisions himself as a leader of men.