THE ACCOUNTANT

THE ACCOUNTANT

          In many ways, The Accountant might qualify as the most unlikely movie of the year, at least so far (there’s always plenty of time left for more comic book flicks, complete with the usual complement of shootouts, fireworks and computer generated imaging).  To begin with, the notion of a film about an accountant, hardly the most exciting or glamorous of professions, hardly seems a promising cinematic subject.  In addition, though responsible for numerous suspicious activities, as Hollywood’s own history of “creative” accounting demonstrates, accountants, unlike lawyers, have flown under the radar, barely attracting public attention of any kind; they probably still labor under the image of a numbers nerd wearing a green eye shade cooking the books for someone.

          Nevertheless, the new movie makes both the process and the protagonist fascinating.  Ben Affleck plays the title character, Christian Wolff, who owns a tiny office in a drab strip mall in Illinois; the first time we see him at work, he helps a couple with their income taxes, saving their farm from foreclosure.  Like some superhero, however, under various pseudonyms in another identity he performs much more lucrative and interesting work for a variety of questionable clients—Arab despots, Mafia bosses, terrorist networks—apparently helping them to hide and launder their money.  The job that functions as the central situation of the film involves his specialty, forensic accounting, investigating the disappearance of many millions of dollars from a firm that manufactures prostheses. 

          As Wolff pursues clues to the loss, the Treasury Department begins its own investigation of his activities, based on footage of his meetings with various international clients and their own forensic accounting.  Much of the film’s appeal  derives from two parallel investigative tracks, one showing Wolff’s gradual entanglement in the terribly violent outcome of his work, the other the pursuit by the Treasury agent Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) and her boss, Ray King (J. K. Simmons).  The sheer process, the details of the ways in which the two alternating quests work, complete with computer analysis, videotape recordings, criminal histories, the specific methods of research and the related back stories of the important individuals combine to create a most compelling narrative.

          Those back stories enrich much of the picture’s surface, fleshing out characters, solving some mysteries, and ultimately tying all the people together.  Christian Wolff is a high functioning autistic, as he tells Dana Cummings (Anna Kendrick), the young woman who first blew the whistle on the missing money, and who complicates his life in some unexpected ways.  The movie shows flashbacks to his childhood, which explain his personality and behavior and provide substantial evidence for the peculiar skills he brings to his profession beyond his knowledge of financial wheeling and dealing.

          Maintaining a stoic deadpan throughout the movie, speaking mostly in a clipped monotone, and steadfastly avoiding any affect, Ben Affleck accomplishes a kind of tour de force in the role of the autistic accountant, an odd achievement in a thriller to begin with, and a difficult task for any actor.  In a couple of moments his disability even creates comedy, which of course means nothing to him, since his emotional range cannot stretch that far.

          In showing the histories of several other characters the film links all of them together, either through the commonality of their professions, relationships, or mere chance; it actually suggests that its world in fact operates on a series of apparently coincidental events that connect everybody, most of them finding a nexus in the accountant himself.  Its final sequences solve a continuing puzzle that generates most of the violent action recurring throughout its length, drawing in almost everyone, especially its protagonist.  The script demonstrates quite a lot of ingenuity in those connections between apparently unrelated incidents and people and its resolution of some surprising mysteries.  Without a great deal of publicity and despite its cryptic title, The Accountant apparently is winning audiences and, surprisingly, turns out to be one of the most exciting movies of the current season.

THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN

THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN

          Based on the best-selling thriller by Paula Hawkins, which currently floods the bookstores, The Girl on the Train should command a ready-made audience. The book also employs a most cinematic structure, which should make it smoothly adaptable.  It uses multiple narrators and points of view, jumps backward and forward in time, and a unifying symbol, the commuter train that runs through all the action, unites the characters, and provides both symbol and basis for the central situation.  Even the transplantation from England to America presents no particular problems for the script.

          A depressed, alcoholic young woman named Rachel (Emily Blunt), who’s lost her job because of her drinking, still rides the train from Westchester to Manhattan every day, mostly because she doesn’t know what else to do with her sad life.  The train passes near her former house, where her ex-husband lives with his new wife and baby daughter, and by another, where she observes an attractive, loving couple, Megan (Haley Bennett) and Scott (Luke Evans).  Those people and their lives represent all that she has lost and cannot ever regain, an apparent happiness that she will never know.

          Through flashbacks and cuts from one couple to another, as well as through Rachel’s point of view, the picture unfolds several stories, which frequently differ from Rachel’s interpretation of people and events.  Because of her often inebriated condition, her emotional fragility from her divorce, her fantasies about the perfect couple she sees every day, her confused memory, she becomes the perfect example of an unreliable narrator.  When Megan disappears, the police investigate and question Rachel about her vague reports of seeing the missing woman getting into a car during one of her periods of drunkenness; as her story grows more confusing she involves Scott, her ex-husband Tom (Justin Theroux), and his wife Anna (Rebecca Ferguson).

          As the various narrative threads and characters intertwine, a solution to the mystery begins to emerge and along with it, revelations of a truth that none of the characters previously understood.  The apparent reality dissolves under Rachel’s increasing comprehension of what actually happened and who abducted Megan.  Those revelations in effect solve the mystery but also suggest a kind of shared guilt—all of the people bear a painful burden from their respective pasts, which influences their actions and their plight and leads to the tragedy in the film.

          The multiple points of view maintain the sense of the difference between appearance and reality, and lend some energy to a regrettably uneven narrative pace.  The director, Tate Taylor, employs a great many tight close-ups of characters’ faces, a technique that may initially suit the style and content of the film, but gradually grows both visually and thematically overstated and rather wearying.  He also tends to repeat shots and scenes beyond a kind of necessary limit, so the movie often seems to be showing the same people and action over and over.

Beneath the surface of its mystery, The Girl on the Train ultimately fits right into the contemporary version of that old standby, the chick flick.  Beyond its focus on the major characters, the three connected women, it shows that the male characters are either inadequate weaklings or cruel betrayers.  Despite their victimization, the women essentially triumph, even in a final bloody act of violence, but the picture is honest enough to show that their victories create a certain ambiguity; nobody finally earns genuine happiness or even satisfaction, and several lives, if not ruined, have been drastically altered.  In a sense, the movie suggests that everyone hides some secret, that everyone is guilty of something.

THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN

THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN

            Based on Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai, the original Magnificent Seven may be the first ensemble Western, employing a whole group of actors, some of them with distinguished careers, rather than a single dominant star.  The movie spawned three sequels and a television series and possibly influenced a couple of others with similar concepts of plot and character, most notably The Professionals and The Wild Bunch. 

The picture follows the simple plot of its predecessor, showing the gathering of a disparate group of gunfighters under the leadership of a special individual, in this case a bounty hunter named Sam Chisolm (Denzel Washington), to fight against an evil man oppressing a whole village full of innocent people.  The bad guy in question, Bartholomew Bogue (Peter Sarsgaard), terrorizes a small community to keep his gold mine poisoning the air and water, and employs an army of thugs to kill anyone who opposes him; in an early sequence that reveals his character and methods, he announces his takeover of the town, punctuating his speech by ordering his men to execute some of the people who protest.

One citizen, Emma Cullen (Haley Bennett) resolving to take revenge on Bogue and release her town from his grip, hires Chisolm for the job; as it turns out, he also has a serious score to settle with the tyrant.  He recruits six other men who then travel with him to help defend the town against Bogue and his men.  They defeat the deputies Bogue has installed to keep everyone in his thrall, train the inept citizens in marksmanship, free the apparently enslaved miners, and erect a series of defenses against the anticipated attack, which ultimately involves a whole army of Bogue’s thugs and a devastating Gatling gun.  The movie thus follows a predictable but reasonably entertaining pattern, and we all know that, despite the odds against them and the obstacles they face, the Seven will somehow prevail. 

The Magnificent Seven should also satisfy any student of the Western, that great American form, in its deployment of several of its obligatory devices.  Aside from all the gunplay, it features, for example, the poker game, the saloon fight, the whorehouse (dance hall in the old days, when those cowboys really loved to dance), the rite of passage from cowardice to courage in peaceful townspeople.  A couple of times the director, Antoine Fuqua, uses that familiar long panorama shot of a rider or group of riders traversing a vast and empty landscape, and now and then he employs the techniques of the spaghetti Westerns, with tight close-ups of faces, long silences, and an eye-level camera.

Its most problematic elements involve the actors themselves, the group who constitute that Magnificent Seven.  Aside from Denzel Washington, the movie lacks the kind of strong presences who command attention in the original—people like Ethan Hawke and someone named Chris Pratt simply cannot match Steve McQueen, James Coburn, Eli Wallach, and Charles Bronson.  Washington himself underplays throughout, sometimes almost whispering his lines; in one of a few anachronisms, he speaks of a “worst case scenario,” a phrase I doubt ever was uttered in 1879.

The generally awful Vincent D’Onofrio balances Washington, simply chewing up the prairie as the largest and loudest member of the Seven.  The only unusual addition comes in the form of a Chinese expert, Billy Rocks (Byung-hun Lee), who throws knives and darts, some of which he stores in his hair, with deadly accuracy.  Peter Sarsgaard plays the evil Bartholomew Bogue with a chillingly soft spoken delivery, making a little speech equating his savage actions with both democracy and Christianity (sound familiar?).  He commits a couple of actions that perfectly establish his character—when his tame sheriff brings him bad news, he simply shoots the messenger.  Worst of all, in the early sequence where he first appears, he sets fire to the church: holy smoke.

WAR DOGS

TWO NOT SO GOOD GUYS WITH GUNS

            Based on actual people and events, War Dogs tells a most unusual story of two young dopes who more or less fall into the highly profitable international arms trade.  Not surprisingly, the movie provides a salutary lesson in greed, but also shows something of the actual wheeling and dealing in that tricky and often dangerous business.  As both life and the movies teach us, easy  pickings, sure things, and double crossing often lead to disaster, which is what happens when a couple of moral morons involve themselves with guns and find themselves playing with the big boys in a game they don’t fully comprehend. 

            The two friends in War Dogs, David Packouz (Miles Teller) and Efraim Diveroli (Jonah Hill), who knew each other in their adolescent years, reconnect when Efraim returns to Florida, partially bankrolled by his uncle (Kevin Pollak), full of ambitions to make a killing in the arms business. He enlists his friend and the two of them embark on their first big deal, attempting to supply an American colonel in Iraq with a truckload of Beretta pistols (why the colonel must acquire the weapons on his own remains a mystery).  The job turns out to be complicated and exceedingly dangerous, involving crossing several borders in the Middle East and surviving an attack from the Taliban.

            As they sink deeper or perhaps rise higher into their new business, the partners accumulate the usual trappings of wealth in today’s America—expensive cars, fancy apartments, a plenitude of drugs.  They also find themselves connected to some heavy hitters, who actually perform a little hitting on Packouz.  Ultimately they land in some difficult territory, partly as a result of diving in over their heads and partly as a result of Efraim’s penchant for double crossing

and back stabbing.  When he stiffs an Albanian partner in a particularly intricate scheme, he and his partner become the target of an FBI investigation.

            In starring Jonah Hill, the director, Todd Phillips capitalizes on some of his work in The Wolf of Wall Street as a crooked, greedy, drug-addled wheeler dealer.  In War Dogs he adds to that image through adding a good deal of plain nastiness and a sort of generalized vulgarity to all his words and actions.  His employs his corpulence, his obnoxious mannerisms, his steady line of profane bluster to good effect, so much so that Miles Teller, though nominally the protagonist and occasional narrator, fades away when they occupy the same scene.  For better or worse, Hill dominates the picture, which generally grows less interesting when he’s absent.  A fascinating story in itself, War Dogs loses much of its appeal in its failure to balance its violence and tension with its sometimes outrageous comedy, summed up perfectly in Jonah Hill’s character.

INDIGNATION

INDIGNATION

          Although he has officially retired from writing—and who could blame him, it’s a tough racket, after all, and he’s had a good run—Philip Roth can still enjoy the lucrative benefits of film adaptation.  The latest Roth novel to make it to the screen, Indignation, actually seems a rather odd choice.  (Frankly, though I consider myself well-read and have read most of Roth’s novels, I have never even heard of this one.)  The new movie uses some material familiar to any reader of his works—Jewish American domestic life, anti-Semitism, the difficulty of assimilation , sexual initiation, and in this case, the fish-out-of-water situation of a Jewish student from New Jersey attending a deeply Protestant college in Ohio.

          The student, Marcus Messner (Logan Lerman), the son of a kosher butcher, attends the wonderfully named Winesburg College in Ohio, where he encounters a number of new experiences, all of which turn out badly.  An excellent student and captain of his high school baseball team, Marcus wants only to study and learn, ambitions constantly thwarted by a series of personal and academic obstacles.   He resents the compulsory chapel attendance, the efforts of the Jewish fraternity to pledge him, and his two obnoxious roommates.  Although he captained his high school baseball team, he even refuses to try out for the Winesburgers. 

          When Marcus meets a young woman named Olivia (Sarah Gadon), his troubles and confusions compound.  On their first date, she provides him with the sort of sexual thrill freshmen in the 1950s can only dream about, which causes him to react in some unpredictable ways, and leads to a series of other problems.  His innocence in a way obstructs his understanding of whatever relationship could develop, and he fails to comprehend Olivia’s own difficulties.

          The real meat of the picture, oddly, consists of a series of dialogues between Marcus and the dean of the college (Tracy Letts), a thoroughly obnoxious academic who attempts to discover and correct everything he finds wrong in Marcus’s attitude and behavior.  Dean Caudwell, a kind of compendium of every dean you or I ever encountered in college, constantly badgers Marcus, delving into his background, religious beliefs, dating habits, and even his quite understandable desire to move from his crowded three-student room to a single.  Their dialogues go on for far too long and grow increasingly disturbing, which may account for the film’s otherwise odd and dubious title.

          A picture that starts and ends strangely, Indignation for the most part concentrates on the perfectly interesting subject of its protagonist’s struggles with a new and different situation.  It begins to disintegrate in effect with Marcus’s puzzled reaction to Olivia, his talky meetings with Dean Caudwell, and an attack of appendicitis that brings his mother out to Winesburg; that visit leads to greater disillusionment for Marcus and further problems in his relationship with Olivia.  Ultimately, a movie that proceeds with a certain clarity, simplicity, and reason finally ends, almost shockingly, in madness, despair, and death.

AB FAB

AB FAB

            Most fans of public television know those dreadful British situation comedies, where the canned laughter in reaction to colossally unfunny lines and situations sounds tinny and desperate, and the characters throw pat lines at each other, pause for the laughs, and mug outrageously.  (They may represent retaliation for the American Revolution).  One comedy that didn’t appear on PBS, but ran on a cable channel, differed drastically from the usual tepid, mechanical fare, a wild show called Absolutely Fabulous, which starred Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley as a couple of completely irresponsible, decadent, hedonistic drunks, somehow surviving in the vague fields of public relations and trendy magazines, always hunting for money and men.

            The new movie, cleverly titled Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie, pretty much follows the patterns of the TV show, including the presence of a couple of the supporting actors, venturing further into its essential outrageousness and never really pretending to anything like authenticity.  Its makeshift plot involves the efforts of Edina (Saunders) and Patsy (Lumley), feeling their age, who hope to reinvigorate their failed careers by representing the model Kate Moss, who plays herself.  They end up knocking the model into the Thames, landing in deep trouble, absconding to the South of France, and continuing a series of often raunchy misadventures. 

            In addition to Moss, several other famous people appear as themselves, including Lulu, Joan Collins, and in a very funny little moment with Lumley, Jon Hamm. They enhance the appeal of a silly but entertaining film overflowing with improbable situations, bright colors, and weird characters.  If the London fashion scene resembles the one in the movie, that world is heavily populated with completely and variously obnoxious people.   Aside from piling one excessive comic scene on top of others, the movie really consists mostly of wild farce and exaggerated gags, or in other words, amounts to an extension of the old TV show.

Cafe Society

Review of Café Society

          His fans will no doubt rejoice at the annual Woody Allen movie, this one called Café Society, and not terribly different from his last dozen or two dozen mediocre efforts.  (One exception: Blue Jasmine, a very unusual work from Allen, and a very good movie).  Set in the 1930s and narrated by the writer-director, the film shows the career of a young man from Brooklyn, Bobby Dorfman (Jesse Eisenberg), who goes to Hollywood to make a life for himself; he hopes that his uncle, Phil Stern (Steve Carell), a successful movie agent, will help.

          Phil deputizes one of his secretaries, Vonnie (Kristen Stewart), to show his nephew around town, the Hollywood of a now romantic past.  After a number of pleasant excursions, the two young people reach a point of mutual affection, but as it turns out, Vonnie is involved in an affair with Uncle Phil.  That discovery drives Bobby back to New York, where he launches a successful career working for his gangster brother as the maître d’ in his posh night club.

          The movie’s occasionally comic moments revolve around the amusing Dorfman family, which bears some resemblance to the family in one of Allen’s better films, Radio Days.  Its emotional elements remain steadfastly on the surface, with the writer-director telling the audience pretty much what the two main characters feel about each other.  Since neither Jesse Eisenberg nor Kristen Stewart convey anything resembling genuine passion, they appear merely to be acting out Allen’s hardly credible lines.  Eisenberg pretty much owns the tiresome role of the naïve young guy, which he’s played far too often, and though Woody Allen, Jesse Eisenberg, and Steve Carell constantly proclaim her beauty, Stewart remains a quite ordinary and quite insipid personality.

          The movie looks carefully polished and authentic, with the cars and clothes and, especially, all the wonderful popular music of its time.  Oddly, nobody refers to the Great Depression that after all, defined the decade.  Café Society belongs with most of Woody Allen’s recent—actually over a couple of decades—works: it’s trivial, shallow, and utterly empty of anything resembling real emotion.

SPLASH AND CUT

SPLASH AND CUT

Review of A Bigger Splash

            It’s one of those occasionally tense European decadent dramas, complete with wonderful Mediterranean scenery, appropriately accompanying weather, and a considerable amount of nudity, just the sort of thing, in fact, to wow the reviewers.  A Bigger Splash also employs a couple of highly regarded performers, Ralph Fiennes and Tilda Swinton, in some rather unlikely roles.  Such a full and attractive package should appeal to the appeal to art house crowd, and its generous display of nudity might even bring in a wider audience.

The story revolves around four characters enduring an uneasy relationship in on a picturesque Italian island, where a famous rock star, Marianne Lane (Tilda Swinton), suffering from strained vocal cords and reduced to silence and occasional whispering, is apparently vacationing with her lover, documentary filmmaker, Paul De Smedl (Mathias Schoenaertz).  Interrupting their idyll, her producer and former lover, Harry Hawkes (Ralph Fiennes) calls and announces he will be visiting with his 22-year-old daughter Penelope (Dakota Johnson), whom he has not seen in many years.  Not surprisingly, his intrusion triggers a series of difficulties, erotic encounters, and ultimately, disaster.

Contrasting with the voiceless singer and the passive filmmaker, Ralph Fiennes maintains a manic volatility throughout the movie.  Dancing, singing, shouting, jumping naked into the swimming pool, and thoroughly obnoxious, he indeed makes a bigger splash than anyone else.  His history with the singer establishes a level of discomfort in the group and of course disturbs the relationship between Marianne and Paul.  He behaves as a kind of engineer of mischief, stirring up the past, delighting in the tensions he creates.  As he grows increasingly annoying, the plot grows increasingly repetitive until some predictable and some completely unpredictable events move the film to a surprising close and a couple of unexpected twists of plot and character.

A Bigger Splash, which owes something to the French movie La Piscine and the more recent Swimming Pool, creates a most attractive atmosphere of Mediterranean languor—the landscape, the houses, the town, the food, the wine all virtually invite the audience to participate in the vacation along with the characters.  The movie runs too long until its strange and unexpected ending, and I am not sure if Ralph Fiennes or Harry Hawkes deserves the blame, but the character seems exactly the sort of person I would never want to be around; his manic energy and domineering personality should alienate even the most forgiving viewer.

Review of Genius

            Many years ago in his reminiscence of The New Yorker, James Thurber remarked that writers in America were either putter-inners or taker-outers, an accurate division of much of our literary history.  Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson come to mind, one an inclusive, verbose celebrant of the nation, its language, its people, the other a neurotic recluse writing spare, stripped little gems in a terse conversational style.  In 20^th century poetry the equivalent artists might be Robert Creeley and Allen Ginsberg; Hemingway and Faulkner surely provide the most appropriate examples of two coeval geniuses who wrote the best fiction of their time in completely different styles.

            The trophy for greatest putter-inner of that now distant past, however, undoubtedly belongs to Thomas Wolfe, whose novels simply overflowed with words, demonstrating a kind of inebriation with sheer vocabulary.  Based on a book by A. Scott Berg, Genius deals with the relationship between Wolfe and the most famous editor of the 20^th century, Maxwell Perkins of Scribners, who edited, among others, both Hemingway and Fitzgerald.  When Wolfe enters his world, the writer-editor connection ascends to a new level, in some ways changing the lives of both men.

            After repeated rejections, the young writer (Jude Law) brings his long, unwieldy manuscript to Perkins (Colin Firth), who finds it compelling and astonishes the author by accepting it; they work endlessly, with Perkins attempting to prune the excesses and Wolfe fighting to retain his original, voluminous, and undisciplined prose.  The novel, for which Perkins supplies the title, turns out to be Wolfe’s first and most famous, Look Homeward, Angel, and also turns out to be a best seller, creating a reputation that made him famous in the 1930s, but which, aside from a few courses in Southern literature, mostly in Southern universities, is mostly forgotten today.

            The real story of the film concerns the growth of the personal relationship between the two very different men, one a young, boisterous, immature artist from the South, the other a middle-aged, uptight Northeastern WASP.  Sloppy, awkward, sometimes rude and obnoxious, insulting to other writers, Wolfe becomes a friend and something like a son to the cool, restrained editor.  The friendship also creates tension between Perkins and Wolfe’s lover, the theatrical designer Aline Bernstein (Nicole Kidman), who nurtured the writer’s career and regards the editor as a threat.

            Genius provides glimpses into Wolfe’s brief life—he died at 38 of tuberculosis of the spine—and the success of his later novels.  Comically and truthfully, it shows his bringing a couple of crates of manuscript to Perkins’s office, all of which he considered one work of fiction; Perkins heroically quarried two or three novels out of the inchoate mess.  The move provides only a few perfunctory scenes of actual editing, with Perkins naturally insisting on cuts and omissions while Wolfe begs for inclusion of all of his hundreds of thousands of words.  Whether editing makes for interesting cinema remains doubtful, of course, though with that rare element,  imagination, it might prove a productive subject for some entertaining sequences.  Although he certainly accomplishes his apparent goal of showing the two characters, the director, Michael Grandage, never takes a chance with the fascinating problem of writing and editing.

            Jude Law, who’s been busy lately, makes a perfectly acceptable Thomas Wolfe, with a performance as excessive as the original; the overacting and repetition sometimes grow tiresome, but he projects a believable portrait of the artist.  The real subject of Genius, however, is not the writer but the editor—when was the last time a film employed such a protagonist?—embodied brilliantly by Colin Firth.  Always tightly buttoned up, he wears his fedora in everywhere, indoors and out, even when fishing, in a three-piece suit, with Hemingway (Dominic West), so that the hat becomes an expression of his rigidly controlled personality, perhaps even of his editorial philosophy.  Firth acts with remarkable restraint, establishing the distinction between him and his young writer and demonstrating the gap both must close, perhaps in a way suggesting that two very different men are both in their own way worthy of the film’s title.

Review of Money Monster

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.