Shortly after Olympic wrestler Dave Schultz was shot in killed, in 1996, a spokesman announced at a press conference, “John du Pont is a marksman, and he has an arsenal. We don’t know how many guns or how much ammunition he has.” This man pushing sixty, unbelievably wealthy thanks to a family fortune that stretched back generations, had taken one of the weapons from that arsenal and written an ugly, lurid story with the pull of a trigger. Back before stories celebrity freak shows and rampant gun violence seemed to arrive with the regularity of the tides, the twisted tale of what happened on du Pont’s estate, which also served as a training facility for Olympic wrestlers, stirred sickened fascination.

Director Bennett Miller has been trying to turn the story into a film for so long that it was once envisioned as his follow-up to 2007’s Capote. It’s not hard to suss out why pulling the project into shape would have eluded him for so long. There’s a weird trashiness to the story that’s at odds with Miller’s clear preference for refinement. There are big themes aplenty that can be teased out of the baseline story, including the ability of American wealth to purchase anything, at least for a time, included transferrable glory, but they are likely to get tangled in the true crime floridness of it. Should it be played as stern drama or fever dream satire? Is it grand tragedy or simply the bleakest of  cautionary tales? The film Miller has finally created, Foxcatcher, moves shiftily amidst all the possible approaches, like mist through a tangle of turnstiles. In never completely settling into concentration on a singular point of view, the film winds up as spookily hollow as a cavernous, empty room in an abandoned mansion wing.

Steve Carell plays du Pont with a heap of facial prosthetics and a raspy, reedy voice that suggests Despicable Me‘s Gru without the accent. It’s a performance that is technically sound and spiritually adrift, lacking the sort of depth that could make the character’s malicious neediness resonate. When du Pont recruits Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum), a gold medal-winning Olympic wrestler who still lives in the long shadow of his similarly honored brother (Mark Ruffalo), it’s almost as if he’s deliberately orchestrating a codependent relationship, bringing in someone who can be forced to feel the same levels of ugly need. When Mark’s appreciation begins to fade, du Pont also enlists Dave Schultz onto the Foxcatcher wrestling team, setting into motion bumper cars of jealousy and recrimination that will lead to a final, deadly outcome.

The film aches with its own aspirational importance, which only causes it to feel brutally dull. There are nice touches here and there (I’m fond of the way both Tatum and Ruffalo adopt the stiff, rumbling walks of men whose muscular forms have outpaced their bodies’ abilities to operate gracefully), but they start to fade into the drab, unrelenting grayscale emotions of the overall film. Foxcatcher scratches at universal truths without uncovering anything all that profound or poignant.