The film struggles to create a context in which the climactic murder seems inevitable, but the facts don't support a psychological case study — all indications are that du Pont more or less
lost his mind in the weeks leading up to the murder, whereas most
of Foxcatcher takes place almost a
decade earlier — and screenwriters Dan Futterman (who also wrote Capote) and E. Max Frye (Something Wild — this is not) never manage to build a series
of petty rivalries and resentments into
tragedy.