Rating: R
Runtime: 1 hours, 45 minutes
Director: Craig Gillespie
Quick Impressions:
My husband followed the GameStop stock surge with great interest. Unfortunately, that’s not a pun. I don’t think we owned any shares of GameStop stock. But he did dabble in the stock market back in 2020 when we had an unexpected windfall of gameshow earnings.
As I watched Dumb Money, I suddenly wondered, “What if he participated in this moment, got huge returns off a small investment, then held too long, lost it all in a blaze of tragic glory, and never said a word to avoid upsetting me?”
I hope that’s what happened. I’ll assume it did. My husband gives me so much. I hope every moment we’re not together, he’s off having an epic, cinematic adventure. (For his sake, I hope it plays out like Dumb Money, not Uncut Gems.)
Surely everybody in America was talking about the GameStop thing. My husband was. My dad was. I had never even used Reddit back then, but somehow, I knew about it. In fact, during the pandemic, our older son was intently following the stock market and doing some investing, so even he (a high school senior) was talking about Robin Hood and the GameStop thing. (In fact, I think even my younger son knew about it. He was five, but he’s always wanted to be a professional YouTuber, and that was all over YouTube.)
I was mildly excited for this movie. Usually, films about financial scandals and how rigged the system is really get my husband going. He loved The Big Short, and the trailer for this had a similar vibe. (All star cast, systemic injustice, kind of a comedy.) We keep missing movies I vaguely want to see because we’re always at high school football games and band contests. (It just seems like bad parenting to be like, “No, sweetie, sorry, I can’t come to your thing because I kinda want to see this movie about a teen lesbian fight club to see how it plays with tropes in those intersecting sub-genres…”) Plus, I’m writing all the time, anyway, and teaching RE. But I pushed a little harder to get us to this one because I thought my husband would really enjoy it, and it might have some Oscar potential.
What I didn’t realize until watching the closing credits was Dumb Money is directed by Craig Gillespie who also directed the live action Disney movie Cruella. (I probably should have noticed in the opening credits, but I didn’t.) We all loved that movie at our house. It drew almost continuous laughs from my daughter. (And now I really need to re-watch a scene of Dumb Money where a character jokes about a Disney villain to catch exactly what’s said.)
Then I noticed, to my greater surprise, that the Winklevoss twins are Dumb Money’s executive producers. That seemed uncanny to me because I’d been joking about Armie Hammer just before the movie started. Also, Dumb Money is adapted from a book by Ben Mezrich called The Antisocial Network. Why save material like this for the end credits?
The Good:
If you like pussy references, this is the movie for you. Maybe because Keith Gill (Paul Dano) goes by the name Roaring Kitty on YouTube (or maybe for some other reason), Dumb Money manages to work in the word “pussy” more than any movie I have ever seen, including Goldfinger. I’m mentioning this first because it’s just so unusual. “WAP”is in the soundtrack, but it’s not the only song that punches the word “pussy.” It seems to show up repeatedly in the background of every scene.
Throughout the film, scheming finance guys and the news media repeatedly refer to the juvenile vulgarity of the way Gill’s followers communicate. Are these songs he actually played on his YouTube channel then? I don’t know, but practically every character in this film is buying up GameStop stock and jamming out to “WAP.” Also, there’s a scene in which college students at a party play a game where one must stick her hand in another’s panties. (I found that stressful. First, I thought, “What a great way to meet people!” Then I thought, “No! That would be awful! What if you were the one in the panties, and some random person picked you? And then what if you weren’t enjoying the game, but the person was giving you really good stock tips? That would just be confusing.”)
At any rate, I don’t remember ever seeing a movie before that went out of its way to throw in the word “pussy” as much as this one. Then at the end, one character finally decides to step up and “run with his dick out” (literally!).
What does this transition mean exactly? I’m not sure. I need to watch the movie again. But I have to mention it because it’s so unusual. (I mean, I’m not saying movies never use the word, “pussy,” but this movie is about the stock market!)
Loads of movies and shows lately have glossed right over the pandemic, so I enjoyed seeing people wearing masks, spending more time online, (endlessly listening to “WAP,” I guess). I like the representation of (even, the acknowledgement of) pandemic culture. I think it’s a nice touch that people keep pulling down their masks and being asked to pull up their masks. We get the realistic touch of central characters having lost relatives during the pandemic. That’s one thing that makes the pandemic so harrowing. Everyone suffers world-shattering losses, so there’s no one untouched to pick up the slack or do the comforting. I remember thinking my Jeopardy! run insulated our family from the horrors of 2020, and then my mom suddenly died. No one escapes unscathed from global tragedy of that scale.
Dumb Money lets us see the real faces of the people buying the stock. They aren’t just numbers or anonymous Reddit accounts. We get to meet them, spend time with them. Overall, they’re a diverse group, representing all different kinds of totally normal Americans. We get a GameStop employee (Anthony Ramos), two UT students (Talia Ryder and Myha’la Herrold), a nurse and single mother (America Ferrera). (Is that all? As you’re watching the movie, it feels like more characters are being introduced.)
Not surprisingly, these colorful, interesting, sympathetic characters are all made up for the movie. (I checked when I got home.) Their stories get some invented supporting characters, too (like Larry Owens as a down-to-earth nurse and Dane DeHaan as a strangely off-putting GameStop manager).
America Ferrera is starting to feel like my new best friend. As soon as I saw her, I thought, “Oh! It’s my friend from Barbie!” She’s so sympathetic in that movie it bleeds over into this one right away. My husband noted, “In the end, she sticks to her principles.” I replied, “In the beginning, she sticks to her principles.” He was like, “Oh yeah. That’s true.” Who would have dreamed a pandemic nurse would be a person of good character?
We also get a less interesting crop of characters based on real people, including Keith’s brother Kevin (Pete Davidson), who temporarily delivers Door Dash on a borrowed bicycle, Keith’s wife (Shailene Woodley), his working-class parents (Clancy Brown and Kate Burton). Seth Rogen makes Gabe Plotkin perhaps too hard to hate. Sebastian Stan makes Vlad Tenev seem like a creepy opportunist using his business partner’s sad backstory to launch his own business. Nick Offerman gives us a Ken Griffin committed to corruption, while Vincent D’Onofio makes Steve Cohen seem like a very boring man.
We’d never be able to keep up with the diverse pockets of characters in this story except they’re all obsessed with what Keith Gill is doing in his basement.
Best Scene:
Instead of any one scene, I like best the explanations from each investor about why they aren’t selling their shares yet. Everyone gets a chance to explain this, and the stories are more interesting because we hear all of them. That captures the energy of the grassroots movement. It’s not just that one person has a grievance or an ideal. Countless people share similar grievances and principles.
Best Scene Visually:
There’s a wonderful scene in which Gabe (Seth Rogen) is working with a PR consultant and his lawyer to prepare to be questioned about his disastrous decisions. Everything that seems familiar to him—including his surroundings in the room—is called to his attention as being problematic. This forces him to look at his home and lifestyle in a new way. Sadly, he never seems to get the point. The moment is disorienting and confusing for him, but he appears to miss the lesson.
As someone forced by my daughter to watch The Fabelmans ten million times, it’s also fun to see Seth Rogen and Paul Dano as awkward adversaries again.
I also liked the film’s visual gimmick of introducing (and giving a curtain call to) each key character by showing their financial assets on screen.
Best Action Sequence:
It’s hard not to be captivated by the truth-or-dare variant that asks the player to put her hand into someone’s panties. There are so many ways that could go wrong, but it would make a great “how I met your mother” story. (“I put her my hand in her panties, and then she started giving me stock market advice.”)
I also like all the scenes featuring Pete Davidson.
The Negatives:
My husband observed, “One issue I had with the movie is that it took me a long time to feel invested in any of the characters.” He is the most empathetic person in the world. And stories about injustice (particularly as it relates to financial schemes of the one percent) always hit for him. So if he had trouble connecting with the characters, other viewers will, too.
“What’s funny,” he went on, “was the one character I did get inve…”
“Was it Pete Davidson?” I interrupted, gushing, “He was the one I liked.”
“It was Pete Davidson!” he exclaimed in excitement. “He seemed so genuine.”
I remember pointedly thinking during a fairly slow section of the movie, “I totally see why people always date Pete Davidson. He has such presence, and his character seems so real. Maybe I should date Pete Davidson.”
Don’t be put off by our enthusiastic embrace of Pete Davidson, though. We’ve always liked Pete Davidson. We liked him before everyone started dating him and I started joking about that constantly. We liked him from his debut on SNL.
But I’ve always liked Paul Dano, too, and I agree with my husband that it takes a while for the audience to feel invested in his character. Unlike my husband, I did empathize with America Ferrera’s character (Jenny, the nurse) almost right away. I’ll admit, though, that’s largely because some primitive part of my brain thinks she really is her Barbie character.
Still, though this cast is full of likeable people and good actors, the story does take a while to grab you. Maybe it’s because there are so many characters. Maybe it’s because the central character is more charismatic online than in real life.
Equally problematic for me was my inability to hate Seth Rogen. He’s kind of a villain in this movie, but you can’t be too mad at him because he doesn’t even know he’s the villain. I can’t decide if that’s a problem because Rogen is so mellow and friendly, or if the movie does not want us to see him as a villain. He’s more like another tier of victim, I think.
Rogen plays hedge fund manager Gabe Plotkin as a pretty nice guy who’s simply unaware of his own privilege. True, he doesn’t seem to think of the people he screws over as people, but if he thought of them as people, surely he could never do that job. (“Yes, but that’s the point,” my husband said.) Though God knows I don’t have the income or the acumen to collect wine, I agree with Plotkin that his wine collection isn’t that large and find his naïveté in not understanding why that would be off-putting to the working class kind of sweet.
Plotkin considers himself a power player when, in reality, even he is in a different class from the people who actually run things. There is a gulf he doesn’t notice until it’s too late. (He has these adorable, middle-class ideas that you shouldn’t go into debt. He doesn’t understand how financial systems work at all!) I think the movie intends us to view the character this way. If I’m wrong, then there’s something off with Rogen’s performance. We can laugh at him, I suppose, but we can’t hate him. (At least I couldn’t.)
Plus, I find his wife (Olivia Thirlby) sympathetic when she says it’s hard for the kids to adjust to virtual schooling. I attended virtual kindergarten with my son. That is hard. In-person school is a much better fit for him. (Is being a nurse during the pandemic harder? Well, yes, I assume. Still, it is hard to supervise rowdy children in virtual school. It doesn’t matter how big your wine collection is. Most young children engage better in person, hands on.)
The more villainous antagonists (Nick Offerman, Vincent D’Onofrio, Sebastian Stan) do seem cartoonishly evil and thinly drawn. Despite a self-aware “Disney villain” joke, the film does not give us the opportunity to know these people as humans. So, the protagonists consistently complain that the rich look down on them, mock them, and treat them as less than human. Then the movie turns around and treats the rich that way. There’s a weird justice to this approach, granted, but I would prefer more realistic, nuanced portrayals of these “antagonists.”
Dumb Money tells an interesting story, and I’ll probably read the book. I do think that such an exciting story doesn’t feel as high stakes as it should in this film. None of the characters ever seems to believe in the reality of the stock earnings. They all continue in the GameStop adventure because they’re acting on principle. They don’t expect to win, so when some of them don’t, there’s no great sense of loss.
Overall:
I wish I liked the stock market, but I don’t. Like many of the characters in this film, I’m coming to terms with the fact that nothing I like much will ever be profitable. This movie is worth watching with some good performances and thought provoking (though depressing) points to make. In the end, Dumb Money taught me everything I need to know about Wall Street (i.e. if I ever stumble into a stock with staggeringly good returns, I will probably hold onto my shares too long and end up running naked through a lightning storm with Pete Davidson).