★★★☆☆
When all those clever film historians look back on 2023, there’s a chance they might think we all went a bit mad.
The highest-grossing film of the year is based on a doll. A three-hour biopic of a nuclear physicist just passed $900 million (£726 million) at the box office. Ben Affleck made a sports drama about a shoe.
And now, with Dumb Money, Sony and writer/director Craig Gillespie have made a 105-minute comedy-drama about a short squeeze (that’s a stock market thing, apparently). What’s more, it’s only the first of three GameStop projects in development.
Then again, perhaps the popularity of the story isn’t all that surprising. Since Adam McKay’s The Big Short found a popular way to tell Wall Street stories with a sense of humour, the publicly bonkers events of the GameStop short squeeze in 2021 were always going to spark a bit of a bidding war amongst the big studios.
For anyone who needs reminding, Dumb Money is based on those weird few weeks where the news kept talking about GameStop. United by a Reddit page and a stock YouTuber called Keith Gill (Paul Dano in the film), thousands of regular folks bought up stocks in the brick-and-mortar video game store, sending its value skyrocketing and losing those nasty hedge fund managers (who, in another The Big Short parallel, had essentially bet against the company’s success) billions of dollars.
That the film turns this ridiculous real-life situation into a consistently entertaining narrative is its first, and probably most impressive, success. The action (as far as watching various people looking at graphs can be considered action) clips along at a tidy pace, economic jargon is explained in just enough detail to give us the gist of what’s going on, and the dialogue is as quip-filled and witty as a film about the stock exchange needs it to be to stop our attention wandering to something more interesting (the bottoms of our shoes, for example, or that odd stain on the cinema carpet).
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Dumb Money’s second achievement is that it turns a community of people who routinely call each other the r-word on the internet into protagonists we can actually root for. Pitching them as ordinary folks using their nostalgic love of video games to stick it to the capitalist man certainly helps, and it’s hardly difficult to find more reasons to root against billionaire hedge fund managers. Gillespie’s dialogue even turns their meme-heavy speech patterns into something that doesn’t make you want to push them into a canal.
The cast, a particularly star-studded affair including Paul Dano, Seth Rogen, America Ferrera and Nick Offerman, helps that goal to no end. With a script that happily jumps between around half a dozen very human stories, together they’re just as likeable/detestable as the script needs them to be. Dano’s doe-eyed family man takes up the bulk of the screentime, while Sebastian Stan’s detestably dumb tech-bro entrepreneur and Seth Rogen’s blindsided billionaire make for suitably hissable villains.
Set Rogen plays against type as a billionaire hedge fund manager (credit: Sony Pictures)
As with all films based on a true story, there’s an understandable degree of creative license taken with the stock squeeze story, particularly regarding the r/wallstreetbets community’s more questionable fringe elements. But where Dumb Money succeeds most is in its nuggets of pandemic-era relatability. More than a stock exchange movie, then, the lockdown-inflected setting turns the film into one of the first blatantly pandemic-set flicks of its kind.
That realism pops up in a few surprising places. America Ferrera’s single-mom nurse is persuaded to buy more stocks after a socially distanced conversation at a gas station has her craving a sense of community. Lockdown measures are elegantly shown as a class issue first and foremost – a shot of Nick Offerman’s hedge fund manager playing tennis surrounded by mask-wearing resort workers proves particularly affecting.
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In fact, it’s Dumb Money’s pandemic portraiture that makes it a compelling watch more than its stock-based story. Much like Air earlier this year, Gillespie suffers somewhat from a subject matter that just isn’t inherently all that interesting. For one thing, despite the title, the film never really acknowledges how dumb the whole situation is; while the David vs Goliath story is perfectly entertaining to watch, it’s quite frustrating that no one seems to be acknowledging the ridiculous system that allowed this to happen in the first place.
Still, as far as real-life dramas about obscure stock trivia go, Dumb Money solidly entertains, and with an aesthetic and musical style apparently hewn from the same rock as the Social Network (coincidentally, the Winklevoss twins serve as Executive Producers for some reason), it has a real filmmaking style to match. If nothing else, it suggests we might have all gone a bit mad after all.
Dumb Money arrives in cinemas on 22 September.
