So Dumb (CREDIT: Sony Pictures/Screenshot)
Starring: Paul Dano, Pete Davidson, Seth Rogen, Shailene Woodley, America Ferrera, Nick Offerman, Anthony Ramos, Sebastian Stan, Dane DeHaan, Myha’la Harold, Rushi Kota, Talia Ryder
Director: Craig Gillespie
Running Time: 104 Minutes
Rating: R for Dumb Profanity and Cheeky Nudity
Release Date: September 15, 2023 (Limited Theaters)/September 29, 2023 (Expands Wide)
What’s It About?: STONKS! I could attempt to continue to write the rest of this review of Dumb Money in the lingua franca of the r/WallStreetBets subreddit, but alas, I’m probably not well-versed in it enough to produce something coherent. So I’ll instead keep it generally prosaic. Back in 2020 and early 2021, r/WallStreetBets was the social media hub for something rather strange happening in the stock market. Based on the advice of a chicken tender-obsessed financial analyst named Keith Gill (Paul Dano), a whole cadre of amateur traders decide to go all in on the retail chain GameStop. Meanwhile, Wall Street types like Gabe Plotkin (Seth Rogen) and Kenneth Griffin (Nick Offerman) are fairly confident that they should do exactly the opposite by short selling GameStop stock, what with the general decline of in-person retail video game sales. But the meme-fueled enthusiasm of working class folks like a nurse (America Ferrera), a couple of college classmates (Myha’la Harold and Talia Ryder), and even a GameStop cashier (Anthony Ramos) ensures that Opposite Day will be arriving very soon.
What Made an Impression?: Cutting Through the Malarkey: If you feel that the financial markets are a rigged game, it’s probably because their rules are too intricate and incomprehensible to anyone who can’t afford to spend hours poring over them every day. So it’s a bit of a minor miracle that Dumb Money is so easy to understand despite all that. It certainly helps that it’s based on a story that was widely covered by the media. And the underlying concepts are straightforward enough that you don’t have to sweat the details. But maybe we’ve also become more financially literate as a society since the days of Occupy Wall Street and the other populist movements that followed in its wake, along with the democratizing rise of the Robinhood stock trading app, which plays a major role in this story. But also, it comes down to simple storytelling skills: the characters are compelling, so it’s easier to pay attention to what’s going on.
A Busy Pandemic: Recent history is a major part of popular cinema, and if that trend is going to continue, then we can’t ignore the COVID-19 of it all. As this story takes place during the height of the pre-vaccinated pandemic, there are a lot of face masks. That was a time of heightened anxiety, but it was also a time of doing whatever the hell else was part of your life, whether that meant surreptitiously texting in class, trying not to curse in front of your kids, or even trying to run that sub-4:00 mile you could never quite pull off in college. Buying stocks that become worth millions of dollars isn’t cool, you know what is cool? Making billion dollars’ worth of memories that you’ll cherish forever.
What’s Behind the Screen?: Context is king. Dumb Money relies on a fair amount of pre-existing news footage, as well as clips of real politicians from Congressional hearings. This mix of documentary and dramatization equals illumination. The events of this story initially played out behind Zoom screens and Internet-speak, and now we get some juicy peeks into how those scenes might have played out in the flesh. They’re filled with the high-stakes foibles of humanity, offering an irresistible mix of voyeurism but also sympathy, as well as savagery but also a dollop of optimism. If the Almighty Dollar remains king, we’ll all remain dumb for it, but hopefully we can still blast through the status quo a bit in the meantime.
Dumb Money is Recommended If You Like: The Social Network, The Big Short, Memes
Grade: 4.5 out of 5 STONKS
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