Film Review: Dumb Money

 

Sexuality/Nudity Mature

Violence Acceptable

Vulgarity Objectionable

Anti-Catholic Philosophy Mature

You know it is a rare thing for me that a movie's soundtrack immediately repulses me.

And yet there I was, sitting in my local theater as the film began and I was assaulted by Cardi B's "WAP."  This is a song that I had heard of, but had done a good job of avoiding.  However, as I was held captive to the production, I was hit with the overwhelming vulgarity of the song.  Normally, if I encounter things like nudity in a movie, I can look away until it is over.  With the music, I had no respite.  As the explicit song continued, I felt a deep pit of disgust well up in my gut.  It did not help that for some reason the people behind us thought that it would be a good idea to bring young children to this screening.

I write all this to paint you a picture of the state I was in as the movie began.  If this colors the rest of my experience negatively, the blame is laid solely at the feet of the filmmakers.  The way you open a movie sets the tone for the entire enterprise.  I know that they wanted to be cool and edgy, but they come off simply as immature and disgusting.  

That is a shame, because the plot of Dumb Money is actually very interesting.  A few years ago during the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of Wall Street firms were short selling the company Game Stop.  While I am no financial expert, I understand short selling as betting on the company to lose money and/or go under.  I know it is more complex than that, but that is the gist.  One of these companies is Melvin Capital run by Gabe Plotkin (Seth Rogan), a wealthy broker living the sweet life with his family.  However, over on the Reddit page r/WallStreetBets, a vlogger named Keith Gill (Paul Dano), talks up Game Stop.  He likes the store and he likes the stock and he invests.  Gill is a low level financial analyst, living modestly with his wife Caroline (Shailene Woodley) and their baby.  He also has to deal with the antics of his loser brother Kevin (Pete Davidson) as Keith tries to keep the family afloat while gaining more influence on Reddit.  As he does, average lower-middleclass people start buying up Game Stop stock through the Robinhood app and the stock price goes up, causing the short-sellers like Plotkin to lose billions.  This draws in gigantic financial powers until the situation comes to a head.

I would have loved for this movie to have been more focused.  When dealing with incredibly complex financial shenanigans, you need a very clear and easy way for the audience to understand.  Dumb Money doesn't really want to do that.  Writers Lauren Schuker Blum, Rebecca Blum, and Ben Mezrich think that it is sufficient to set up the issue as "Super rich are bad, not super rich are good" and leave it at that.  We are meant to identify with the downtrodden people who rally behind Gill.  Some of these people include:

-Marcus Barcia (Anthony Ramso): a poor Game Stop clerk who gets upset when his manager points out his failure to perform his duties.

-Jenny (America Ferrera): a single-mom nurse who constantly cusses in front of her children and takes first-class plane trips when she has no money.

-Riri (Myha'la Herrold) and Harmony (Talia Ryder): a same-sex college couple whose meet-cute involves (I'm sorry to be graphic), involves extended hand-to-genital contact in front of everyone at a party.

Even Kevin is supposed to come off as a scrappy rebel.  But he comes off as the most unlikeable person in the entire story.  This is partly because Davidson is incredibly off-putting.  But Kevin spends much of the movie as an Uber-Eats driver who eats and drinks the meals he is delivering.  This feels like a disgusting violation that is more visceral than most of the supposed villains of this film.

Speaking of which, the movie doesn't quite know how to handle the people we are supposed to hate.  There is a difference between giving a villain complexity and giving the villain more empathy and likeability than the heroes.

Olivia Thrilby plays Plotkin's wife.  She is in very few scenes, but throughout the movie as Melvin Capital begins to lose money, I could not help but think of her and her children.  The movie never gives us a reason to root for her downfall.  Director Craig Gillespie might claim that this is an intentional act of drama, but it is at odds with the class warfare drumbeat of the entire piece.  The only one who comes off as truly horrible is Vlad Tenev (Sebastian Stan), one of the founders of Robinhood.  His shady, smarmy attitude makes us revile him and the way he plays fast and loose with other people's money.  Stan knows how to play the part well.  But with the Plotkin's we are meant to hate them simply because of their wealth.  We are meant to laugh at how out of touch they are.  But they are more relatable than the working-class heroes.  The entire story is framed as an uprising of the downtrodden to take down the corrupt wealthy.  But it never materializes that way.

The movie also doesn't know how to pace itself.  There are several scenes that add very little to the forward narrative and only work if you enjoy spending time with the characters (which you really don't).  

The most likeable person is Gill and that is mostly due to Dano's incredibly affable performance.  He comes across as a well-intentioned person who more motivated by love of Game Stop than he is envy of the rich.  His scenes are the best part of the movie.  All the rest of our "heroes" spend the movie whining and complaining about how unfair life is.  

You have to be really smart to make this movie intelligible to us regular folks.  

But Dumb Money isn't smart.  It's just dumb.