Worth: $17.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Paul Dano, Seth Rogan, Pete Davidson, America Ferrera, Anthony Ramos, Vincent D’Onofrio, Nick Offerman, Meha’la Herrold, Talia Ryder, Sebastian Stan, Shailene Woodley, Olivia Thirlby, Dane DeHaan
Intro:
…. bloody hilarious and well worth your time.
Over the past few years, there have been a few films that have taken the pandemic and the fundamental change to our day-to-day existence, and channelled that into artistic catharsis. In The Earth, Host, Locked Down, Songbird, Bo Burnham’s Inside, even films that aren’t about COVID-19 like Spontaneous, Nomadland, and the Jeremy Sims-helmed remake of Rams were pulled into that same orbit. Today, the overarching mood of isolation, dread, and restless anxiety has been well-ingrained in popular culture.
Dumb Money, the latest from Australian-American populist Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya, Cruella), goes for a more absurdist take. It leans into the sheer oddity of the state of the world, where the GameStop short squeeze was able to occur. The financial world was so definitively railed – even as the 1% still found ways to bend the rules to keep things running to their whims – that a group of Redditors were able to take on Wall Street in a legitimate fight.
From there, Gillespie’s satirical instincts combined with a solid script by Orange is the New Black vets Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo, zero-in on this event as a theatre in modern class warfare. Much like I, Tonya, the insistence on conveying the story solely through a self-conscious lens, can occasionally feel like it’s straining to distil anything else that could muddy up that message, but thanks to the positively stacked casting and the smooth-as-makeup-running-off-a-sweaty-billionaire’s-face pacing, Dumb Money still resonates and sticks the landing.
The net is cast fairly wide: the ground-floor laymen investors that added to the squeeze like Myha’la Herrold and Talia Ryder as college students Riri and Harmony; the first responders on the frontlines of the pandemic like America Ferrera’s nurse Jennifer; the workers stuck on the Stygian hamster wheel that is GameStop’s “Cycle of Life” like Anthony Ramos’ Marcus; the obscenely rich hedge fund managers experiencing hubris for betting on destruction like Seth Rogen as Gabe Plotkin.
And at the eye of the shitstorm, there’s Paul Dano as Keith Gill, essentially playing the lighter side of the basement-dwelling channer that went into his portrayal of the Riddler in The Batman. He puts a suitably down-to-earth face and demeanour on the man who managed to weaponise the id of social media to bite back at Wall Street.
Even though the verbalising of stock market jargon could’ve used a little more clarification (the film seems to assume that audiences have memorised the asides from The Big Short), it more than makes up for that with its ample understanding of meme culture and sheer lack of restraint. This is juxtaposed with opportunists like Plotkin, who needs to self-edit to make himself appear closer to the middle-class than he will ever be.
For audiences wanting crowd-pleasing entertainment, Dumb Money is a smart bet. It certainly has its niggles (executive produced by the Winklevoss twins, this was never going to be too critical of the larger machine), but both as an accelerated depiction of a truly bizarre moment in American financial history, and a refreshing acknowledgement of just how surreal the pandemic got, it is bloody hilarious and well worth your time. We like this flick.