Dumb Money
If you told me that Craig Gillespie called up his 5 recent contacts to come over to film a skit about the 2021 GameStop stock fiasco and then distributed it as a major motion picture in theaters I would believe you.
Dumb Money is a hastily, uninspired retelling of a recent event that needed a few more years to marinate before receiving the film adaptation treatment. The one-dimension interconnected story centers on Paul Dano’s Keith Gill, a Reddit personality on wallstreetbeats who goes by the screen name of Roaring Kitty. Gill gains a following after orchestrating a short squeeze against GameStop.
While the film is centered around Dano, there is not enough compelling material for a full-length feature so screenwriters Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo create a web of interconnected characters in order to explore the impact of this moment outside of Dano. These characters are introduced through their network to set the financial divide, but it seems like the writers forgot to add any emotional depth outside of their worth. Many feel like incomplete caricatures than actual human beings. I can’t fathom how there is an entire book written on an event that just happened and more so one that is so simple it has its main character repeating the same three lines over and over again to drill into the audience's mind for their future conversations surrounding stocks. There is not much explanation as to why or how this event happened because of how far removed its protagonist was from the actual event. Every moment to try to strike an emotional chord with its audience feels completely manufactured; they want so badly for audiences to like these characters.
The success of movies like The Big Short, Hustlers, and The Social Network is that they are not about the event they are retelling but focus on a microcosm perspective to make it interesting. The Social Network evaluates friendship within the context of success and jealously, Hustlers uses working women as a lens on the detrimental effects of the recession, and The Big Short could pass as a finance lecture but has four distinct characters to drive interest in the story. These stories are interested in the psychology and motives of its key players whereas Dumb Money focuses on their monetary value as a character description.
It would have been a more interesting film if they used these characters’ addiction to the stock market to explore online and gambling culture or what drives people to replace affection with money. So much could have been done here to make it a commentary on at least something interesting. Dumb Money attempts to frame itself as a haves versus have-nots fable. In theory, this works but it props itself up as the moment inequality was uncovered specifically in American society. In trying to simplify the story for all audiences, it just comes off as elitist and treats its audiences as if they are dumb.
Craig Gillespie brought together his usual collaborators featuring a subpar editing job from Oscar winner Kirk Baxter. This film has not one ounce of personality from its director. There is nothing wrong with subtle films, but the way this film is constructed feels rushed and lazy. Nothing about this world feels lived in, from the production design to the nonexistent cinematography it is cold. It is overly reliant on splicing social media footage and memes to create intensity. For being a film about being online it feels like the people who made it have never been online. Even small moments like the zoom screens and phone calls have user interface flaws that can be caught by the most simple eye. Gillespie is making a name for himself by recreating scandalous pop culture events but has nothing to add stylistically or intellectually.
Dumb Money suffers from recounting the pandemic the world is still experiencing. It heavily relies on trends that capture the difference between 2021 and 2023, but it just feels out of touch. This is being marketed as The Big Short for Gen Z when all of its subjects except two are millennials. The documentation through TikTok as this was happening in real time makes a movie about it feel reductive.
Wasn’t the huge inequality exposed by the pandemic from access to medicine enough to prove there is a real power imbalance between the 1% and everyone else? The script is so obsessed with making this a movement that it offers nothing of substance. Something about about a struck corporation distributing a movie about class divide dismisses the integrity of this story.
Honestly, this could have been a 30-second TikTok that would have been more impactful and entertaining.