PHOTOGRAPH BY SCOTT GARFIELD/SONY PICTURES CLASSICS/EVERETT

Independent filmmakers who search for financing for their projects are likely to have met unusual characters with deep pockets and a fascination with movies. Even films with the most earnest and austere artistic inspirations seem to offer a toehold on Hollywood glamour. That mystique gets people outside the movie business to finance independent and low-budget movies—and leads to misunderstandings and bitter conflicts when the plans of filmmakers and the dreams of financiers don’t mesh. Even if the sums at stake aren't large by Hollywood standards, the egos are—as are the feelings of pride and the scope of the shattered dreams.

Now there’s a movie about this: “Foxcatcher,” which is based on the true story of the brothers and Olympic wrestlers Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum) and Dave Schultz (Mark Ruffalo) and their fateful encounter with John E. du Pont (Steve Carell), an heir to the chemical-company fortune who sponsored Mark and hired Dave in the formation of a national wrestling team—and who murdered Dave in 1996. “Foxcatcher” is about wrestlers, but it’s equally, and overtly, about money and the American way of financing—about who pays for the expensive beautiful things.

Wrestling isn’t the only thing in the movie that relates to this theme of beautiful luxury—the very title of the film, “Foxcatcher,” refers to the farm where du Pont and his mother (Vanessa Redgrave) live. The mansion is a work of art in itself; so is the property; so are the sport horses that his mother raises on the farm; so are the hobbies, ornithology and philately, that hitherto occupied du Pont’s funds and energies. So are movies. One of the most interesting things about "Foxcatcher" is found in the credits, with Megan Ellison and her company, Annapurna, among its producers. Ellison is one of the exemplary independent producers in the contemporary movie industry. The list of films that she has helped to finance is a parade of high-level art cinema, including the Coen brothers' “True Grit," Paul Thomas Anderson's "The Master," Harmony Korine's "Spring Breakers," David O. Russell's "American Hustle," and Richard Linklater's forthcoming baseball movie, "That's What I'm Talking About." She got into the business of bankrolling movies by means of money that she got from her father, Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle. She's an heiress who does many marvellous things with the wealth that has been bestowed upon her, and with the power that comes with it. I consider her a heroine of contemporary moviemaking.

“Foxcatcher,” by contrast, is the story of an independent producer as antihero, a monster who arises to fulfill a need and who preys upon those in need. The Olympic Games, over all, are another such expensive and beautiful thing (“Olympism is a philosophy of life, exalting and combining in a balanced whole the qualities of body, will and mind”), and the background to “Foxcatcher” is the private financing of the U. S. Olympic team. That background is kept very much in the foreground of the movie, starting with the gold-medallist Mark Schultz training for world-championship matches while living on ramen in a dingy apartment and scraping together an income from speaking engagements at local schools. When du Pont contacts and flies him to Foxcatcher for an interview, the heir reminds the athlete, “You know how the Soviets support their wrestlers.”

The money that du Pont pays Mark Schultz, directly and indirectly (by housing him, letting him form a team that is also housed on the property, and providing it with a new and well-equipped training facility), also buys a lot of other things—first of all, access. Du Pont, himself a frustrated sportsman and wrestler, becomes an intrusive presence in Mark’s life, turning him into a sort of mascot to be trotted out for du Pont’s glory and employing him as a trainer to prepare the doughy elder man to wrestle competitively in the over-fifty-five category. In the movie, Mark Schultz, who grew up virtually fatherless, publicly refers to himself as du Pont’s son.

Were du Pont merely a benevolent financier, as are Ellison and many others in movies, Olympic sports, and elsewhere in the land of individual initiative (a notion that du Pont himself celebrates, in the film, with patriotic pomp), there would be no story. Bennett Miller’s movie depicts an outlying case of a system’s perversion by a person who is partly malevolent and partly deranged—but it also shows a system that leaves itself open to abuse. His most recent film, “Moneyball,” is about the independence of mind that emerges from financial constraint, the invention that is mothered by necessity. “Foxcatcher” runs on static—it’s the story of extraordinary interference by emotional factors that get in the way of the smooth flow of philanthropic financing to a beneficiary who can make good use of it.

The nature of that interference is the heart of the film—and that’s where it runs aground. Miller has made an intimate psychological drama that’s devoid of intimate psychology—it details the outward particulars of du Pont’s manipulations without probing their deepest implications, the connection between sex and violence. There are exactly two scenes in the movie that add value by way of Miller’s direction. The first comes very early on, when the two brothers are training together in the otherwise deserted gym of the college where Dave Schultz is working as a coach. In one very long pan shot, in their mutually coalescing solitude, they grapple with a physical aggression nonetheless infused with the fullness of their fraternal love, which turns it passionately, albeit subliminally, erotic.

What’s missing from “Foxcatcher” is sex. Mark Schultz has no girlfriend, and no boyfriend, either; the other young wrestlers who live on du Pont’s property and train with Mark are also devoid of romantic entanglements. As for du Pont—who was, in real life, sued in 1988 by a college wrestler for sexual harassment—he has no attachments either. The movie offers no grounds to speculate on sexual tensions between du Pont and Mark Schultz—it offers virtually nothing sexual at all, once the early scene with Mark and Dave is done. But this lack of sexuality is never treated as an absence. (By contrast, the sexual desire of a fighter in training is a crucial theme of “Raging Bull.”) If the movie is about asexual or sexually repressed men, that itself would itself be a salient aspect of this (or any) story.

It’s as if Miller were consciously shying away from the particulars of his characters, a shying-away that results in one of his most unusual and distinctive directorial decisions. His three lead actors all deliver superbly etched character performances. They are collections of extraordinary mannerisms—Carell, with his flat and papery voice; Tatum, with his jutting jaw and blank stare; Ruffalo, with his limp and his velvety bonhomie—that seem to capture characters in their entirety while actually blanking them out at the same time. This kind of paradoxical performance is not unprecedented; on the contrary, it’s a classical, old-Hollywood thing to do. (The first example that comes to mind is Edward G. Robinson in Howard Hawks’s “Tiger Shark.”) But directors who present these sorts of performances with authority offer images, gestures, and symbols that go beyond character to unfold, as if in a first-person directorial monologue, the depths and shadow zones unaddressed in action and performance.

Miller doesn’t come close—except in one brief scene that takes place aboard the helicopter in which du Pont and Mark Schultz are flying to a banquet where the wrestler will be obligated to take the podium and introduce du Pont, in a brief speech that was written for him. Mark is stumbling over a phrase of fulsome tribute to his benefactor—“ornithologist, philatelist, philanthropist”—and, fuelled by cocaine, du Pont, held in a long take, gets some kicks from his directorial coaching of the young man in the diction of the line and its dramatic contours.

Instead of inventive images, Miller offers sumptuous ones—somehow his images seem too expensive. It’s as if his sense of graceful beauty—an ordinary, unoriginal, and unsurprising one—rested on the warm cushion of money that is itself the movie’s unspoken subject. The authentic benevolence of its financiers—contrasted with du Pont’s predatory ways—folds back into the texture of “Foxcatcher.” The Schultzes managed to win gold medals without du Pont’s help; sometimes even benevolence is an overreach.