Answers Without Questions: A Personal Reflection on FOXCATCHER
I cannot remember if I ever actually participated in a real wrestling match. My days on the mat were so long ago that they feel more like a dream to me; a memory that might not be mine. When I think of wrestling, I donât think of me at all. I think of Oliver.
Oliver wrestled with me when I was 6 years old. He was small, blonde, and had a scrunched up face with a toothy smile. He went to school with me at Chancellor Street School in Newtown, PA. Wait...maybe he didnât...but he definitely went to school with me at Goodnoe Elementary, where we spent second through sixth grades before finishing our pre-college schooling as life-long attendees of the Council Rock School District. What Iâm trying to say is I knew him from school, and the only extra-curricular we did together was wrestle. And Oliver was good at it.
I was not. As with every sport I tried in my youth (save golf, for some reason), I found it incredibly frustrating. Here I was, with absolutely no idea how to play this game, being dragged across a smelly mat in the gymnasium of a school I wouldnât attend for years. Iâm sure the coach described the basic rules at some point, but I was probably daydreaming, hoping I could get out of there in time to watch some TV before I had to go to bed earlier than my siblings. Somewhere between picturing what post-practice slurpee I would indulge in, and posturing what the Brady Bunch were up to that evening, the coach would call my name and I would be expected to do something to another six-year-old in front of a group of my peers.
I knew I had to pin the other kid, but as a chubby kid with no upper body strength I knew this would be impossible. After trying maybe once to actually do it, I realized very quickly that if I just gave up, went limp, and let the other kid have his way with me, that I would be free from this ordeal and I could go back to counting the bleacher steps until practice concluded. The coach would scold me for not trying, but I would ignore him, and stare at the ceiling fixtures, wondering just what all of those tubes didâŠ
You can see my point. These practices, buried in a middle school gym during the darkest nights of winter, always felt like the most melancholy experience I could possibly imagine. I hated and dreamt for the feeling of the icy air freezing my sweat stained hair, because it was uncomfortable but it meant that I was finally going to my properly lit home, where I didnât have to pretend to be something I was never going to be.
I wonder if Oliver ever felt that way.
When I would get paired with Oliver, he would do something other kids didnât: he would be nice to me. If I went limp, he wouldnât just beat me and pretend he won. He would ask if I knew how to play, if I needed help, or just, âwhy are you doing that?â
He wasnât a jerk. He was gentle. He wanted to win, but not against me. After a long talking-to about quitting, which I received after I quit any sport for good, my Dad reluctantly pulled me out of the program, probably mourning the loss of a hefty down payment more than the hypothetical trophies I could have been awarded in the future.
Oliver stuck with it. He wrestled all through middle and high school. They might have won a state championship, I canât remember. He was known for it, but he was probably more well known as a really nice guy. Every class I ever had with him would find him agreeing with my points, laughing at my jokes, or playfully one-upping me. He had a hot girlfriend, and he looked like he actually knew how to have a relationship, when the rest of us were just pretending. I could go on and on, but despite never really hanging outside of school, it is safe to say that I really, really fucking liked this kid. And it all went back to the occasional, âHey remember when we used to wrestle together? Man, you were not good, hah hah!!â
While napping in my dorm room in 2008, I got a voicemail from a friend who still attended my high school at the time. She delivered the news as straight-forward as possible: Oliver had hung himself in his University of Pittsburgh dormitory. I donât know why he did this.
This is why I find Bennett Millerâs Foxcatcher so fascinating. Though I donât read reviews before I go see movies, I had gleaned that it was a true crime story about a man and his wrestling coach. These descriptions seemed to suggest that the film was wrestling adjacent, with the crime at the forefront of the story. Whatâs more interesting to me is that even though I am from the Philadelphia area, I had never heard of the du Ponts, or of the crime at the center of the story (I mentioned earlier that I hail from Newtown, PA, which is about 40 miles from Newtown Square, PA, a town I never heard of until I attended college).
This label as a true crime story is a very small hole to fill with the peg that is Foxcatcher. From the onset, Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum) is shot with a heavy distance between him and the camera. Before you move forward into the film, I can tell you straight away that we will never really know him. There will be no point where it all comes out. We donât get some speech about his will to keep fighting, or his love of the game, or why he wrestles in the first place. Mark will, for the remainder of the film, be a punching bag, a sack of potatoes, a wild buck, and an indentured servant, but he will never have the agency we desire in a protagonist.
To me, heâs a wrestler.
John du Pont, the wrestling coach played by Steve Carell, seems to be scheming from day one. There were multiple points in the film where I turned to my friend and asked, âwhat the fuck is going on?!â It seems so clear that some giant crime is unfolding before my eyes, only I canât see what. Is he somehow embezzling from the wrestling team that he has built on the massive Foxcather Farms, where his family dynasty calls home? Is he laundering money through it, siphoning unseen millions past Uncle Sam? Is he, dare I ask, sexually abusing the athletes he is metoring? Any number of scenarios sped through my head, each one being dismissed entirely because I wanted to wait to be surprised.
And of course when the crime happens, it does just that: it âhappens.â And then itâs over. It doesnât surprise, nor does it telegraph itself in an extremely obvious fashion. It happens as starkly as it did in real life. Saying a scene foreshadows the event is probably more hindsight bias than truth. I fear Iâm giving too much away with how Iâm phrasing it, but I think itâs ok due to the fact that I donât think the crime is what itâs all about. Without it, there would be no reason to tell this particular story, but with it, the story flourishes beyond its constraints. And this seems to be what frustrates every critic about this movie. They donât feel like the crime is âearned,â when I think it doesnât need to be earned at all. It might be the only climax I can think of that doesnât need validation.
This is probably because of Oliver.
I can never possibly know why Oliver took his own life. I could make it a passion project, try to track down his friends, his roommate, his family, in an attempt to piece together a puzzle that would just keep spitting out pieces. I could rack my brain for lost conversations that might foreshadow his demise, only to find myself making up stories about the way he was. After all, I can barely remember if I ever competed in wrestling, how could I possibly remember what Oliver was like to me in those practices?
The movie has answers for us, but they aren't answering the questions that are bothering us the most. When asking, "Why did this happen?", it's not that how we got there is unclear, but the spaces between the facts and assumptions lack a certain strength or clarity. Some feel thatâs lazy, or perhaps that Miller is not willing enough to dig deeper into just what makes a crime mean something past its own dimensions. Wesley Morris of Grantland (with whom I rarely agree but whose writing I adore nonetheless) says of the director, âMillerâs movies deny the trap of salaciousness in favor of the impression of factuality. That might be what some people like about them. Their flamboyant restraint signifies tastefulness, artiness.â
Yet Morris says he has watched Foxcather three times, in what now must seem like a futile attempt to reconcile with the climax of the film, much like how I have attempted to guess why an acquaintance of mine took his own life. When we watch movies and feel like we just got somewhere but donât know how, it can be upsetting and ultimately feel as if the movie missed a turn an act or two ago, or even worse, that it took a bad shortcut to get there.
I find all of Millerâs films exercises in the unknowns: Why could Truman Capote never write another book after In Cold Blood? What exactly was his relationship with Perry? Can Billy Beaneâs sabermetrics ever actually win Oakland a championship? Will he even feel something if he wins that ever-elusive last-game-of-the-season? Moneyball ends (but not really) with -- spoiler alert -- the team losing in the playoffs, in one spectacular shot of the opposing teamâs celebratory run onto the field fading into a lone, lit visitorâs dugout, a voiceover from a sports analyst declaring that despite it being a fun experiment, sabermetrics will just never work. OrâŠ.will it?
Itâs frustrating. Itâs painful. Itâs slow -- then fast! -- then slow again. Itâs meticulous. And then -- bwop! -- itâs done.
To me, that sounds an awful lot like a wrestling match.
Oliverâs death was the last of a string of suicides in my high school and our sister high school, all of them involving kids on the wrestling teams. Oliver was able to get his high school diploma at least, but his pain followed him to the next phase of his life. The stress of competition, of making weight, of being the best at a sport that relies on your size and stamina more than a particular set of skills that other team sports exploit in their players; these things I always imagined to be the building blocks to Oliverâs exit. I heard some whispers about his relationship with his Dad, a theme du Pont drives home over and over again in Foxcatcher, that a coach is a father to his athletes. du Pont mentions this so many times because he thinks he should say it, yet we never even hear about his own father, only his coddling mother whose respect seems to be the only thing that matters to him.
The internal conflict within athletes is something a lot of sports movies dive headfirst into, but Millerâs distance feels actually real to me, not like itâs some lens to hide behind. The elation of a win, a feeling that takes so long to achieve, is so short lived, only to be replaced by the all-too-familiar feeling of insurmountable pressure. That pressure might only relieve itself with a lengthy career on a pro circuit, as it becomes your day-to-day. Or it might meet its maker when youâre injured out of nowhere, and forced to quit what youâve spent a lifetime perfecting. Or maybe it can end in a more tragic way, with someone not just extinguishing one light, but all of them. I am not, nor have I ever been, an athlete of good caliber. I can't possibly know how it feels, no matter how hard someone tries to explain it.
When we canât get what we want, no matter how hard we fight, how do we go on? How do we move into the unknown parts of our lives without the things we used to have? In the absence of value and the excess of time, do we need to do something big, do we need to make a statement?
Or are some people just troubled, and we never see it coming?
One day in my senior year of High School, I had nothing to do, so I sat in the hallway outside our High Schoolâs TV studio to read. At some point, Oliver and another friend, Arielle, joined me. It was spring, we were all about to graduate, and we could feel the finish line approaching. Despite what every graduation speech ever written says, High School did not whiz by for us: I had been in ten plays and countless choir performances and competitions, Oliver had competed in wrestling non stop since he was a kid, and Arielle had joined me in those choir competitions in addition to her cheerleading career. On top of all of that, Arielleâs mom had died of cancer earlier that year. For us three, Iâm sure, it had been a very long four years.
Still, we talked about attending even more school with even more responsibility like it was going to be the most fun thing ever. We had so many questions for each other, and for ourselves, about what this great, exciting time would hold for us.
Oliver, ever the philosopher, pondered something aloud:
âMore than anything, itâs weird that Iâm going to move to a new town. Iâve lived here my whole life, you know? Like...where am I going to get my hair cut?â
Arielle and I looked at each other.
Though I would hardly call this a "review" of Foxcatcher, it is still odd that I didn't mention Mark Ruffalo's name once in here. For what it's worth, he gives the best performance of the film, and this is for a very good reason, one that I believe Miller exploits for very specific reasons. I did love the movie, and I highly recommend seeing it and not reading up on the events before seeing the film.
This piece is dedicated to Oliver, who I really wish I could have a beer with today, and to his family, who feel his absence so much more than I ever could. Rest in Peace.
