Sunday, February 12, 2017

ALL THAT GLITTERS

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.  

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