Team Foxcatcher (2016)

Movie Info

Headed for a catastrophe

John Eleuthère du Pont was always an eccentric.  Under the dominating hand of his mother, John du Pont sought adventure and fame and settled on wrestling.  With his millions and family name, du Pont sought to make the greatest wrestling team composed of the United States’ best wrestlers.  Team Foxcatcher was a success, and things appear to be great with a big future.  Dave Schultz was John du Pont’s right hand man helping guide the program, but du Pont’s paranoia and instability was about to boil over, and Dave stood in his way.

Directed by Jon Greenhalgh, Team Foxcatcher is a documentary based on the murder of Dave Schultz by the millionaire John du Pont.  The documentary was released after the big screen adaptation of Foxcatcher was released in 2014.  The documentary premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and then was released on Netflix on April 29, 2016.

Wish we knew more about Dave Schultz…

The Foxcatcher story is really bizarre.  It is the strangeness of the story that is appealing so seeing real footage of du Pont makes it even stranger.  You had a guy who seemed really unstable that everyone humored…and it came back to bite them.

John du Pont seems extremely crazy.  You can look at some people and see they are…off.  When you are “off” and functioning, it can be dangerous to humor a person, but the people around du Pont did it anyway.  Du Pont was their life-blood and you don’t want to make your boss angry.  I don’t think that the people were necessarily using du Pont, but they also didn’t want to upset the applecart.  Despite his gun love, du Pont just was wacky and didn’t seem necessarily violent.  The issue got ignored for too long, and du Pont finally cracked.

Creep fake wrestling to please du Pont…feels like Mr. Burns from The Simpsons

I remember the family was upset when Foxcatcher came out in that the victim Dave Schultz and his relationship with du Pont wasn’t accurately portrayed.  I felt Dave was a little missing in this documentary as well.  It seemed to be a lot about du Pont tipping over and I felt that Dave’s wife should have been used more for context of the victim.  I kind of expected more footage of Dave’s interaction with du Pont, but the film mostly featured interviews and du Pont’s own interviews…I thought an opportunity to know Dave Schultz better was a missed.

Team Foxcatcher surprisingly doesn’t seem that much different than the drama version of the story.  It still had that strangeness to it that makes you question how Team Foxcatcher went as far as it went before du Pont cracked.  It is good to see John du Pont in the flesh and not a fictionalized version of him by Steve Carell (though you can see through this documentary that Carell did a great job).  Schultz’s daughter showed the most interesting reaction in the whole film and that was pity for John du Pont despite having lost her father to him…it was an unusual response and more thought out than others interviewed about the subject.  John du Pont came from a legendary family, but now, his name is synonymous with mental instability and murder.

Related Links:

Foxcatcher (2014)