Over the past few years we have had, understandably, no shortage of ripped-from-the-headlines excoriations of the super-rich in cinema, but Dumb Money may take the title of ‘ripped-from-the-headlines-est’ movie in this genre. Craig Gillespie’s film dramatizes the GameStop stock chaos from just two and half years ago, showing us the battle between individual investors (termed ‘Dumb Money’ by hedge fund execs) and Wall Street itself to democratise the stock market and show that the super-wealthy (or, at least, their portfolios) weren’t quite as untouchable as they assumed. It’s a fun but scrappy piece, entertaining and lightly informative but bogging itself down with a vast ensemble cast that doesn’t give many of its characters or stories time to breathe.
You may recall that in the depths of the Winter wave of the COVID pandemic a rumble in the stock market happened. A group of Redditors, led by Keith Gill (Paul Dano), aka ‘Roaring Kitty’, saw that a bunch of hedge funds were shorting stocks in videogame store GameStop and took it upon themselves to buy these stocks in vast quantities, bumping up the price and taking cash out of the pockets of parasitic venture capitalists. It was part-meme, part-get-rich-quick-scheme, and part-class war and, while you won’t see any Big Short style cutaways breaking the issues down in digestible detail here, Gillespie and writers Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo do a solid job of setting out each side’s respective stall.
Dano’s Keith takes the lead, but there’s a massive supporting cast, from Pete Davidson as Keith’s shithead brother and America Ferrera as a debt-ridden nurse who joins the GameStop stock train to the entrenched Wall Street power players, represented by a cadre of hedge fund managers played by Seth Rogen, Nick Offerman, and Vincent D’Onofrio. Most of them turn in fun performances, but the film is just too busy for most of this cast to really register as people – even Keith can sometimes struggle for adequate screentime.
Dumb Money is at its best when it most leans in to this almost sketch-comedy approach (though the ‘funny’ needle-drops all land with a thud). There are a couple of genuine laugh-out-loud moments and plenty of gentler gags sprinkled throughout, keeping the 100-or-so minute runtime feeling mostly pretty breezy. Where it comes apart then, is in the more dramatic moments, where it stops aping the scattershot comedy/satire of The Big Short and instead aims to imitate the real-life personal dramas found in The Social Network.
Adapted from the book The Anti-Social Network by Ben Mezrich, who wrote The Social Network’s source material The Accidental Billionaires, and produced by (of all people) the Winklevoss twins, Dumb Money has a lot of David Fincher’s Facebook film running through its DNA. It even pays homage very early on in the first scene in which we meet Keith, which is edited and scored almost identically to Zuckerberg’s run across the Harvard campus in that film’s first few minutes. It’s a nice little touch, but drawing comparisons to one of *the* great 21st Century American masterpieces mostly actually reminds you of Dumb Money’s comparative weakness (my personal final takeaway was less about the Reddit-Wall Street conflict and more about wanting to immediately rewatch The Social Network).
Maybe the first, and certainly the most high-profile, Hollywood film to feature a Redditor as its hero, Dumb Money certainly does an impressive job of capturing the very particular zeitgeist of January-February 2021. It doesn’t match up to its big boy stablemates but, maybe, that suits this film about foul-mouthed internet rebels sticking it to the man just fine.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 