Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Cast: Steve Carell, Channing Tatum, Mark Ruffalo, Sienna Miller, Vanessa Redgrave, Anthony Michael Hall, Guy Boyd, Brett Rice, Francis J. Murphy III, Jane Mowder, David Bennett, Lee Perkins, Daniel Hilt.

Making a film out of sport can be as hit or miss as putting a blindfolded 15 year old goalkeeper up against Lional Messi in the World Cup Final in a best of five penalties on the basis that he once saved a penalty in a school yard against the doddery old headmaster. Sometimes promise never, ever matches reality.

Foxcatcher though is something different, it offers realistic approach to the sport of wrestling that perhaps was envisioned for the early Rocky films, to offer for the cinema a depiction of a sport and the truth behind one of the most complex men to ever believe in their own hype.

Wrestling is either a sport that you get, understand and enjoy or it can leave you cold, alienated and even questioning the type of morals that you would assign to it. To even think of using it as the back drop to a film might be the strangest proposition to be on celluloid in 2015, and yet it is not the sport that is the focus, it’s the relationship between two former Olympic gold winning athletes and one of the most damaging, self obsessed and in the end destructive men in America, the multi millionaire John du Pont.

It is also a film which warns of the folly of outside influence and sponsorship, the person who pays the bills and finances the lifestyle of the sportsman is ultimately the one who tells you what to do. It is the danger of money being used to buy a person’s soul which questions the morality of such transactions. In a world though that never looked after its sporting heroes properly, and in a time that still relies on the power of advertising and television in which to finance the habits, legal or otherwise, the events that unfolded at the du Pont family home in the build up to the 1988 Olympics and the aftermath are quite simply astonishing and brutally disturbing.

There are times when as a film lover you might question inwardly the thinking behind casting, some parts just seem so out of reach to a particular actor. It is a huge credit to Steve Carrell that not only does he capture the figure of John du Pont but he almost relishes in it. The cold dead stare, the ambiguous and fairly distasteful culture in which he brings Channing Tatum’s Mark Schultz into the Foxcatcher lair.

The film though wouldn’t be anywhere near as good, or as realistic if it wasn’t for way that Channing Tatum and the excellent Mark Ruffalo prepared fully in immersing themselves into the roles. The intensity of the sport is framed perfectly by both men and it adds a level of developed pragmatism and some sadness in what may have otherwise been a film for social historians of the sport and those with a keen eye for sporting history.

Foxcatcher is not a film that will fill you with hope but it is a piece of history in which to applaud for its truthful depictions and overwhelming sincerity.

Ian D. Hall