ALL THAT
GLITTERS
Greed may be good, as we have been
told by the financial wheelers and dealers who inform us of the benefits of
that incentive to capitalism, though ignoring much of its consequences. Greed also apparently inspires the film
industry, not only in its own quest for profits, but as the subject of a number
of recent films. The two versions of Wall Street, The Wolf of Wall Street, and The
Big Short all displayed several aspects of the process by which people who
essentially perform no real job beyond making money make money.
Gold, the latest venture into
that process, once again loosely based on an actual story, shows the ups and
downs of a complicated operation to mine gold from the jungles of
Indonesia. The son of a former
prospector in the American West, Kenny Wells (Matthew McConaughey), after
undergoing a boom and a bust in his business, learns of the exploits of a
skilled mining engineer, Michael Acosta (Edgar Ramirez), who searches for valuable
metals. He hocks all his valuables to fly
to Indonesia and enlist Acosta in a gold mining operation, which occupies most
of the movie’s action. For some time,
predictably, the miners find no gold, they run out of money to pay their
workers, and the corrupt government intervenes; the partners have to give the
president’s son a piece of the action to sustain their enterprise.
Once the scheme begins to pay off, however, a major Wall Street firm offers
to buy into what may turn out to be the biggest gold strike in history. Kenny Wells becomes the major player in the
gold market, a hero of the industry, and a greedy consumer of the benefits of
sudden wealth. Naturally, for
complicated reasons, the whole business collapses, a number of high rollers
find themselves broke, and legal questions bring in the FBI.
The real point of the film, apart from its familiar salutary lessons in the
dangers of unbridled lust for wealth, belongs with the person of the star, who
appears in almost every scene.
Apparently bent on stretching himself in many directions, in Gold Matthew McConaughey assumes a very
different look and persona from his previous roles. After playing the emaciated cowboy of Dallas Buyers Club, the soft-spoken
psychopath of Killer Joe, even the
smooth dude of those Lincoln commercials, for the part of Kenny Wells he added
what looks like at least 50 pounds, took off a lot of hair, and adopted some ugly
prosthetic dentures. (The sacrifices one
makes for art!)
Although possibly authentic, those transformations and McConaughey’s
excessively enthusiastic performance hardly turn Kenny Wells into a charismatic
salesman for his golden cause. The
frequent closeups of his sweating, puffy face and unfortunate teeth become
something less than inspirational as the picture progresses. The scenes of this corpulent man wandering
around with his protruding belly looming over his tighty whiteys or emerging
from a hot tub stark raving naked are not entirely pleasant to look upon.
Aside from the sometimes excessive energy McConaughey pours into his role
and his willingness to appear somewhat less than attractive, the movie mostly
works best when it shows the large mining operation in Indonesia, the actual
work of the people, and the lush jungles that provide the setting. Its ambiguous and puzzling conclusion tends
to subvert its exploration of its popular and relevant subject, its motivations
and consequences. As it turns out, greed
triumphs once again.
