Review
of Money Monster
S & B (stocks and bonds) may now
replace S & M (you all know what that means) as a sexy subject in
contemporary cinema—the love of money is the new eroticism. Probably fueled by the financial scandals that flame in the headlines
week in and week out, a number of contemporary films show some of the wheeling
and dealing in that congregation of gamblers, thieves, and whores that
constitutes both Las Vegas and Wall Street.
The trend may have begun with Wall
Street itself, then continued through such recent films, once again based
on actual events, as The Wolf of Wall
Street and The Big Short, which
explains the housing bubble and its bust (frankly, even after seeing the movie
I still don’t understand it).
The
new movie Money Monster touches on another
result of financial manipulation, seldom mentioned in all the learned analyses
of the so-called experts, the impact of the shady practices on ordinary people. The film revolves around a TV show called Money Monster, hosted by Lee Gates
(George Clooney), clearly based on the CNBC show Mad Money and its host, the manic Jim Cramer. Dressed in odd costumes, with a different
intro for each show, Clooney jumps all over the set like a crazed monkey,
offering financial advice to viewers.
His show suddenly crashes to a halt when an intruder named Kyle (Jack
O’Connell) sneaks onto the set, fires a pistol at the ceiling, and outfits him
in the sort of vest favored by suicide bombers.
The
movie settles into a series of desperate attempts by Gates to placate the
intruder and a series of ploys to defuse the situation while a national TV
audience watches. Kyle’s rage results
from one of Gates’s stock market tips, which led him to invest an inheritance
from his mother in the stock of a particular company that soon after lost most
of its value. Stalling for time, arguing
his cause, Gates tries a clever ploy, asking his viewers to buy stock in the
company so that it increases in value and Kyle won’t kill him; after a
momentary jump, it declines, deflating the host’s image of himself, a nice
touch in a film that occasionally mixes comedy with its drama.
The
static situation opens up when Gates, still suited in the bomb vest, with the
pistol to his head, leads Kyle on a march down to Wall Street itself, followed
by scores of policemen and cheered on by thousands of onlookers, a kind of pedestrian
parody of the infamous O.J. Simpson slow speed chase. There they finally learn the real reasons for
Kyle’s loss and confront the mastermind behind the stock manipulation that
caused it. The movie ends in a kind of
despair over the helplessness of ordinary citizens to cope with corporate
exploitation and the hopelessness of defeating the people behind it.
Although
repetitive and generally unconvincing in its attempts to create any real sense
of danger and suspense, Money Monster
touches on some important matters for contemporary America. It clearly demonstrates the possibilities for
fraud and deceit in the business of stocks and bonds and, worse, shows how the
right people can achieve those goals without anything in the way of
punishment. Some of its best material,
however, derives from its depiction of just how a television show works, the
preparation, the role of the director, the activities of all the people behind
the cameras, and so forth. American film
especially excels at showing process—how a thing is made, how a particular job
is done, how people manage certain complicated tasks, and Money Matters shows once again the fascination of such a subject.
