'Foxcatcher' review: Year's best cast carries slow pacing

The moment the decrepit, half-mad millionaire John du Pont appears in Bennett Miller's "Foxcatcher," you may feel your skin crawl. It's not just his stilted speech and his self-aggrandizing rhetoric. It's his splay-footed walk, twitchy movements and dead eyes. A mental alarm goes off: "Who is this guy?"

As you may have heard, this guy is actually Steve Carell, best known for playing affable bumblers in movies like "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" and "Evan Almighty." He once played a suicidal professor, in "Little Miss Sunshine" (2006), but that's nothing compared to his du Pont. Makeup and prosthetics help render Carell unrecognizable -- a beaked nose, aged skin, flabby thighs -- but this is acting of the highest order, the kind that earned Philip Seymour Hoffman an Academy Award in Miller's "Capote."

Carell's isn't the only great performance in "Foxcatcher," which, like all of Miller's features (the last was "Moneyball"), is based in fact. Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo are terrific as the wrestling brothers Mark and Dave Schultz, Olympic gold medalists who have fallen on hard times. Mark, intense and inarticulate, lives on ramen and hot sauce; Dave, older and perhaps smarter, coaches high school to support his family (Sienna Miller plays his wife). Enter du Pont, of "America's wealthiest family," who for some reason wants to shepherd them to gold again. "He was saying stuff that's in my head," Mark tells his skeptical brother.

"Foxcatcher," named after du Pont's family farm, unfolds like a horror film as du Pont lures the Schultzes to his mansion, a real-life House of Usher haunted by du Pont's ailing mother (Vanessa Redgrave). Mounting dread comes from small details (creepy family portraits) and outlandish ones (du Pont buys military weaponry as if the U.S. Army were eBay). The grunting noises and close contact of wrestling suggest unacknowledged impulses.

Though Carell and his director paint a vivid picture of a man stunted and perverted by wealth, "Foxcatcher" moves very slowly toward a climax that may feel a bit desultory, even to those who know the story. The movie is gripping but also tough going. It's the cast, and particularly the revelation of Carell, that makes it worth the effort.