Dumb Money Takes Stock of the Gamestop Squeeze in Droll, Empathetic Fashion: Review
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The post Dumb Money Takes Stock of the Gamestop Squeeze in Droll, Empathetic Fashion: Review appeared first on Consequence.
The Pitch: If the glut of financial malfeasance dramedies of the past few years (Hustlers, Netflix’s Painkiller) has taught us anything, it’s that the gulf between the haves and the have-nots has never been greater. But while films like Adam McKay’s The Big Short (arguably patient zero for this particular trend) diligently explain the mechanisms that hedge fund managers use to screw you over, Craig Gillespie’s Dumb Money dramatizes the rare case where the average Joe got to screw the rich right back.
In case you forgot (or, more realistically, you were more focused on the real-life chaos of COVID), in January 2021 retail investors (“dumb money,” as short sellers call them — regular people who put their leftover lunch money into securities via startup apps like Robinhood) successfully rallied around a mass purchase of Gamestop (GME) stock.
Gamestop was a flagging business, the last vestige of physical video game purchasing and reselling in an age where most people get their games digitally. But because of COVID, it stayed open as an “essential” business, even as short sellers like hedge fund manager Steve Cohen (Vincent D’Onofrio) and Melvin Capital CIO Gabe Plotkin (Seth Rogen) bet on the company’s collapse.
And yet, one stalwart subreddit — r/WallStreet Bets — held the line, buying up stock under the rallying cry of Keith Gill (Paul Dano), aka RoaringKitty, a goofy millennial who wears cat shirts and a red bandana. Is he trying to get rich off a pump-and-dump scheme? Or does he just want to stick it to the Man? If you ask him… he “just likes the stock.”
Before long, RNs and college students gained hundreds of thousands of dollars in net worth, while Cohen and his ilk lost billions by the day. It’s the ultimate David and Goliath story of our age, fought with memes and stubbornness rather than rocks and slings — even as Wall Street pulls some nasty tricks to undermine the meme revolution happening right under their noses.
The Li’l Short: While not quite as stylized or droll as The Big Short (there’s no Margot Robbie explaining stuff in a bathtub), Dumb Money takes a similarly irreverent approach to the convoluted machinations of high finance. For the most part, it works; at a brisk 100 minutes, it keeps its focus squarely on the clear, infuriating divide between the haves and the have-nots. In the opening minutes, we’re introduced to many of our central characters, intercutting between luxurious lounging in palatial mansions (in Cohen’s case, with his giant pet pig lagging behind him) and workaday people stuffed into cramped dorm rooms or ill-lit gamer basements. Their net worth flashes across the screen, the sheer gulf in the numbers designed to elicit gasps.
Dumb Money (Sony)
There are a lot of characters to keep track of on both sides of the aisle: In addition to Cohen and Plotkin, who spend most of their runtime plotzing about the stock price, we get glimpses of Robinhood CEOs Vlad Teneve (Sebastian Stan) and Baiju Bhatt (Rushi Kota), who prop up a flimsy startup with bullshit startup jargon, and Citadel owner Ken Griffin (a steely Nick Offerman), who greets the approaching fire with a steely gaze.
But we also flit around to the normal folks buying into RoaringKitty’s “diamond hands” Reddit mindset, including a registered nurse with a kid and a mortgage (America Ferrera), a GameStop employee (Anthony Ramos), and a pair of college students (Talia Ryder and Myha’la Herrold). Because there’s only so much time to dedicate to so many characters, they register mostly as ciphers, representatives of the sociopolitical forces at play in this unusual game of speculative tug-of-war.
As for Gill himself, we get a bit more of him and his home life, including his quiet certitude in the face of doubts from his steadfast wife (Shailene Woodley), dipshit DoorDasher brother (Pete Davidson, just the right amount of funny), and fussy, retired parents (Kate Burton and Clancy Brown). But apart from some glimmers of family grief that inform their overall mood (the clan visits the grave of Gill’s recently passed sister midway through the film), we end up knowing as little about Gill as his legions of fans and followers do. Any inkling of character flaw or potential malfeasance — as the Congressional Zoom hearing that closes the film implies, Gill may have had foreknowledge of the stock’s performance that informed his trades — is kept at a respectful distance, so we’re left to speculate whether there’s even any truth to those rumors. But complicating Gill’s motives may have disrupted the clear moral lines Gillespie seeks to set, so out the bin that nuance goes.
The Apes vs. the Pigs: The ensemble has to do a lot of explanatory heavy lifting, especially in the first act. Scenes play out as exposition dumps, with characters expounding to otherwise unrelated secondary characters whose only purpose is to serve as a sounding board. Even so, Dumb Money remains a fun ride, thanks largely to Gillespie’s fast-paced style and the perpetual motion machine of Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo’s screenplay.
The film’s COVID setting has a lot to do with how isolated these scenes feel, sequestering characters in masked workplaces or forcing them to communicate through screens. But Gillespie makes it work, especially as the meme train takes off and montages of shitposts and opaque Reddit catchphrases — stonks, tendies, apes — flash across the screen with all the giddy energy of, well, cash-strapped shitposters with little to do but “hold [sic] the line.”
The Verdict: As a primer for one of the funniest, most emotionally satisfying thumbs in the eye to the super-rich in recent memory, Dumb Money is a pretty good time. That said, it leaves out crucial details and has little time to dig deeper into its cast of characters, making it feel like a cardboard glimpse into a complicated blip in the rigged game of American finance. That doesn’t seem to be Gillespie’s aim, though — he’s going for the emotional win, the addictive high that comes from doubling down on a go-for-broke financial scheme that may not make you rich, but might ruin those who already are.
And after everything they’ve done to screw you over lately, doesn’t that feel good?
Where to Watch: Dumb Money runs through lightning with its dick out and into limited release on September 15th.
Trailer:
Dumb Money Takes Stock of the Gamestop Squeeze in Droll, Empathetic Fashion: Review
Clint Worthington
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