Sony Pictures Classics
Looks like it’s Foxcatcher day around the cinematically-inclined internets, as our own William Goss just recently unveiled a stellar A- review of the film out of Cannes, and now we’re all getting graced with the presence of a brand new teaser for Bennett Miller’s latest film. Oh, and hey, it’s totally terrifying.
Based on the real life story of crazed murderer/overly encouraging wrestling coach John du Pont (and also apparently loosely inspired by star Steve Carell’s voicework in the Despicable Me films), Miller’s film sees Carell starring as the creepily intense (and also intensely creepy) du Pont, a rich dude with a thing for bringing glory back to America. No, really. Du Pont’s glory-seeking plan involves training Olympic level wrestlers, which sort of sounds like the perfect thing for a crazed rich dude to do. Du Pont’s desires might seem, yes, a bit nutty, but his path to all that glory is kind of smart – he starts a training program for actual athletes (including the Schultz brothers, played by Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo), using his own fortune as financing. Everything seems to be super-excellent, until he loses his tenuous grip on reality. Sound over-the-top? It’s not – it’s deeply unsettling.
Ready to be chilled to the bone? Brace yourself for the film’s latest teaser trailer.
I’m going to go ahead and make a very hyperbolic bet that the shot that ends this teaser – Carell, standing in the middle of his chi-chi gym, holding a gun, just waiting for everyone to notice him – will continue to freak me out until I see the final film. And then it will probably just freak me out even more.
The du Pont story is a weird one in the annals of American true crime. Despite his success (and Team Foxcatcher’s success) in training Olympic wrestlers, du Pont’s mental instability eventually led him to murder Dave Schultz (Ruffalo) in cold blood – he gunned him down in Schultz’s own driveway in front of two witnesses (including Schultz’s wife). That was followed by a two-day standoff with the cops, his eventual capture and one heck of a weird trial.
Although this trailer focuses on du Pont pre-murderous freak out, the film’s IMDb page actually claims that the films is “the true story of Olympic Wrestling Champion Mark Schultz who decides to get justice after schizophrenic John duPont killed his brother, Olympic Champion Dave Schultz.” Considering du Pont was ultimately convicted of the murder of Schultz, we’re guessing that synopsis is actually totally off-base, or the film is more focused on real justice, not the kind of violent justice we’d expect from a film “about justice.” Weird.
Foxcatcher opens on November 14th.
Related Topics: Channing Tatum
