DUMB MONEY. The big lie or the truth-at-large that remains largely unspoken, is that the stock market is any kind of democratic capitalist enterprise. By the logic of a casino, perhaps: Anyone with money to waste is welcome to come on in; be our guest. Rule No. 1 of the casino being that the house always wins. Rule No. 2: Scared money makes none. Rule No. 3, I suppose, would be to quit while you’re ahead. But nobody who hears the easy money siren song reads all the way to the third rule.
Dumb Money is positioned, both by its own design and the trumpeting of media outlets, as a David vs. Goliath story, of the unwashed masses holding out against the pig-feeding billionaires (see Rule No. 1) who would and will always profit from the eagerness and naivety of the marks whose scraped-together investments create unreal value in an imaginary economy, but very real personal wealth for the vampiric few.
Adapted by Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo from Ben Mezrich’s 2021 book The Aantisocial Network: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders that Brought Wall Street to Its Knees (a customarily grandiose and perhaps misrepresentative title), Dumb Money centers on Keith Gill (Paul Dano), a hobby trader and social media personality known alternately as Roaring Kitty and Deep Fucking Value. As the plague of 2020 descends, Gill begins publicly advocating for the purchase of stock in GameStop, the then deeply troubled brick-and-mortar video game retailer. He shores up his endorsement with a policy of full transparency, routinely publishing his personal balance sheet online. And people start to listen.
Branching out into the investment dramas of a GameStop employee (Anthony Ramos), a young couple at the University of Texas at Austin (Myha’la Herrold and Talia Ryder) and a single-mom nurse in Pittsburgh (America Ferrara) — retail investors, referred to on Wall Street as “dumb money,” for whom the risk is very real — the movie builds momentum along with Roaring Kitty’s growing internet following and stock portfolio. The rising value of GameStop shares attracts the attention of some of the real money: Gabe Plotkin (Seth Rogen), a new-money hedge fund manager and kept boy of nemeses Ken Griffin (Nick Offerman) and Steve Cohen (Vincent D’Onofrio), the latter of whom keeps a hog as a house pet. They attempt to short the stock, but when Kitty, et al refuse to sell, it sets off financial landslides in Plotkin’s shop and at Robinhood, the “free” stock trading app utilized by most of our humble protagonists.
At which point, we should all be standing up in the theater and cheering, but … While director Craig Gillespie (Lars and the Real Girl, 2007; I, Tonya, 2017), a dexterous, seemingly compassionate maker of underdog stories, probably wants to believe that the GameStop story can represent hope for the future rather than a learning experience for the real money, I can’t help but see it as a cautionary tale. A few people (hopefully) were able to enrich their lives by rallying together but even the end title cards warn us that hedge funds now gather intelligence from dumb money buyers to improve their own positions. Too big to fail, indeed.
Still, Dumb Money assembles a stellar cast and one of the best soundtracks in recent memory. It forges compelling drama from what many of us remember as a blip in the fevered news cycle of 2020-2021. No small accomplishment, but not as triumphant or hopeful a moment as it would like us to believe. R. 105M. BROADWAY, MILL CREEK.
THE CREATOR. Gareth Evans, the writer and director, occupies a prickly, increasingly rare space in big budget movies. His Godzilla (2014) was preceded by one the truly great trailers, a whispered suggestion of something the movie didn’t quite deliver. And Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), for which Evans retained his director credit, was purportedly a troubled production salvaged in the 11th hour by stone-cold Tony Gilroy. Evans has been in the press recently, downplaying the problems on that set; perhaps he doth protest too much. Regardless of what really happened, Rogue One remains among the best of the recent Star Wars products (arguably not the highest bar) and the visual acumen demonstrated even in Godzilla is nothing to downplay. Evans clearly knows how to make the most of technology for compelling images on film but can he keep his arms around a story?
Such was the question in my mind as I approached The Creator, (co-written by Evans and Chris Weitz), an artificial intelligence war movie set half a century in the future. And I still haven’t quite answered it. While the movie is undeniable for its scope and the majesty of its images, it still plays a bit overlong but also emotionally truncated. John David Washington is a U.S. Army sergeant initially sent undercover in a New Asia based pro-AI cell (the technology having been outlawed in the U.S. following the dubiously attributed detonation of a nuclear device in Los Angeles). He falls in love, things go bad, his identity is revealed, etc.
Years later, now working on a salvage crew cleaning up irradiated Los Angeles, he’s drawn back into service by the promise of locating his wife, long presumed dead. He is sent to locate and destroy a (surprisingly child-shaped) superweapon with the potential of destroying the U.S. government’s own favorite superweapon.
The Creator is science-fiction action on a scale rarely approached these days, especially when unaffiliated with a guaranteed money-making property. And I celebrate it for that, as well as for the light and texture of its aesthetic. But the emotional investment and payoff that a story like this must have to truly succeed are never fully realized. PG13. 133M. BROADWAY, MILL CREEK, MINOR.
John J. Bennett (he/him) is a movie nerd who loves a good car chase.
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Fortuna Theatre is temporarily closed. For showtimes call: Broadway Cinema (707) 443-3456; Mill Creek Cinema 839-3456; Minor Theatre (707) 822-3456.
This article appears in Transforming Valley West.