There is a strange thing that happens when you place the placard “Based on a True Story” before your movie. With this simple bit of text, sects of viewers begin to split and argue the validity of said movie based on these events. In one corner you have the literalist, where everything on screen has to be completely and utterly true. In the other corner, you have those that are not only comfortable with artistic liberties but they demand it. To this corner, a film is art not a medium of record-keeping. Recently, with the release of American Sniper, Foxcatcher, and Selma the typical rabble from these groups have risen to a dull roar. So with that current landscape, which camp does Foxcatcher, the latest from director Bennett Miller, fall into? Is it a faithful piece of fact recreation or is it a meditation on a certain theme that takes liberty with facts? Or does it even matter?
Firstly, it must be said that Foxcatcher is at least concerned with the semblance of accuracy. If nothing else, the prosthetics and faux-baldness applied to the actors shows some attempt to resemble the true events. On the other hand, without even reading into the actual events, one can assume many liberties are taken in events. In actual life, the boring kind, it is very rare for events and actions to line up so cleanly with a very clearly developed theme of destructive self-doubt. Real life is messy and asynchronous. It’s hard to draw a line from cause to motivation. A person’s actions very often make no sense at all. In Foxcatcher though, everything plays forth like a careful narrative equation that leads to an especially gloomy look at what a lifetime of living in the shadow of a larger figure, and the subsequent self-doubt, can lead to.
Secondly, with that apparent thematic harmony in mind, it becomes apparent during the running time of Foxcatcher that the sequence of events is somewhat secondary to a larger issue. This larger issue is one that can’t be neatly captured in a faithful timeline, it is one of human nature. To capture the fall of the characters, based on real people, in Foxcatcher appropriately in narrative art form a filmmaker has to leave the path of reality. To communicate and explore the psyche of human beings is not to lay out the linear path of actions, it is to analyze and contemplate. During that contemplative period the trees of events become a forest of larger human issues.
So, yes, Channing Tatum, Mark Ruffalo, and Steve Carrel spend a large amount of time and effort into capturing the physical essence of the real people they are playing, they are not bound to the nebulous and confusing way of life. The actors and filmmakers can deconstruct and rearrange the story until it is a piece of art that speculates on causality and motive. So while a straightforward telling of the events within Foxcatcher would be interesting, it would not be emotionally engaging. The purpose of film is not to retell, but to project universal emotions in a way that the viewers can relate and scrutinize.
No, Foxcatcher is obviously not gospel according to Du Pont. It is the puzzle pieces of several human lives taken apart and rebuilt into something else, something far more universal to the human experience. So to criticize a film such as Foxcatcher for historical inaccuracies is to miss the forest of human experience for the trivial trees of specific events.
