I had vaguely heard of this incident around the time the notable movie came out in 2014, but I hadn't had much interest until I saw a youtube video that covered the incident more in-depth. That drew me to this documentary film.
This film is kind of a mixed bag. The focus of the youtube video I saw was almost entirely on John DuPont, whereas this one is much more spread around in terms of its protagonists. Unfortunately, as a result there's very little that we get much depth to. We hear a lot about how Dave Schultz was a great and kind person, but don't really get to see too much of it in action, either through home video footage (of which they use a lot of) or personal stories told by others.
The pacing is very slipshod, as the timeline is given almost no importance whatsoever. I had no idea what year John DuPont got into wrestling, what year "Team Foxcatcher" started, or what year certain people were booted from the team, and had to largely piece together the timeline of events from timestamps on home video footage and guesswork based on the 4-year spacing of the Olympic games.
The overall problem with this is it gives an almost heady, dreamlike trip through the events at DuPont's manor and the team, in which a lot of detail is either compressed or skipped over, and thus very little ends up being retained by the end of it.
Too little attention is given to a great number of characters who appear, have their problems with John, and end up quitting or being kicked out by John as he becomes increasingly paranoid and psychotic. A lot of the home movie footage ends up just being random snippets taken of some of the wrestlers filming their families or their training, and often played with little or no context, just as something to look at while telling the story.
The tragic incident, when it comes, is almost anticlimactic. After so little focus is given on any one particular person or group of persons, there seems to be almost no warning or justification to the murder when it happens. If this was how it actually felt for those living at the mansion, nothing in the interviews or the narrative clues us in to that, particularly as we start getting to incidents with John roaming around the grounds of his property, often drunk and pointing guns at people, or the absolutely psychotic paranoia that leads him to banning the color black from his property, leading him to fire the black wrestlers on his team, which are treated less as serious incidents and more along the lines of "Wow this guy is kind of wacky, isn't he?"
Other instances of the use of home footage seem somewhat unnecessary, particularly the film shot by John himself, including footage of just the woods outside his property. People interviewed tell us the context of this footage, that John was absolutely convinced there were people hiding in the background or artificial trees spying on him, but the footage itself is absolutely unnecessary when the interviewees themselves are highly effective at conveying the extreme unease of a paranoid John showing them video footage he took and ranting at them about robotic trees or whatever.
Probably the worst aspect of this documentary overall is that rather than being complete or semi-complete overview of Team Foxcatcher and the people involved, it left me wanting more. It felt like the most basic kind of introduction to someone completely unfamiliar with the events, not as a means of educating them, but more as an introduction, waiting for some other source to fill in the rest.
It's not a very good sign for a 90ish minute documentary that I feel that I actually got more in-depth information from a 5 minute youtube video segment than I got from this entire film.
