Dumb Money — Review Thread

Dumb Money(9/21/2023)
I’m hesitant to give Adam McKay too much credit given that I thought his last two movies were pretty misguided, but I’ve got to admit that his 2015 film The Big Short has been pretty influential. In particular it seems to have heavily influenced the filmmaker of Craig Gillespie, whose movies since then have kind of aped the tone and pace of that movie and is especially apparent on his latest movie Dumb Money, which is ironic given that it has the exact opposite outlook on short selling as a practice and follows people doing the opposite of what the protagonists of McKay’s film were doing. The film, which seems to have been made in record time, is a dramatization of the Gamestop Short Squeeze which occurred in early 2021 when a bunch of retail investors realized that Wall Street had gone too far in shorting the Gamestop mall store and rallied to buy up the stock’s price and make a killing. The film looks at this from a variety of perspectives, most notably the investment Youtuber Keith “Roaring Kitty” Gill (Paul Dano), various people who got in on the short squeeze like a nurse (America Ferrera), a pair of college students (Myha'la Herrold and Talia Ryder), and a Gamestop store employee (Anthony Ramos), and some people on the Wall Street side of things like the CEOs of Robinhood app (Sebastian Stan and Rushi Kota), Kenneth Griffin of Citidel (Nick Offerman), Steve Cohen of S.A.C Capital (Vincent D'Onofrio), and Gabe Plotkin (Seth Rogan) of the Melvin Capital hedge fund.

Dumb Money is not entirely a comedy but it certainly does have the irreverent The Big Short tone that Gillespie was kind of working with in his I, Tonya. I mostly doesn’t do fourth wall breaks like those other films did but it’s very willing to cut very quickly or put title cards up on the screen and the like. The film is covering events from a very short time ago, which puts this in the odd position of being the first large scale period piece to be set in the middle of the pandemic and featuring a lot of people wearing masks and the like which may make this an interesting movie for future generations to watch as it doesn’t stop to explain any of that. For that matter the film doesn’t seem terribly interested in stopping to explain a lot of the stock market shenanigans either. It doesn’t go all in on being oblique about this stuff by any means but it doesn’t necessarily stop to give exposition about what a “short trading” is or anything like that (no Margot Robbies in bathtubs). In some ways this is admirable but I also think there are places it can be misleading, like when a character likens short selling to asset stripping, which isn’t an accurate comparison at all. I also like the way it pulls out several characters to tell the story through who have a bit of a unique take rather than focusing entirely on Gill, which was probably the temptation.

By and large the film works as entertainment: it has an impressive cast and while I wasn’t rolling in the aisles laughing at it, some of the comedy does work. It’s a watchable and well-crafted movie, but I must say I think it’s take on this whole situation is simplistic at best and rather dubious at worst. The film basically goes all in on forwarding the populist narrative that r/WallStreetBets and the retail investors like Gill were forwarding: that this whole episode was an exercise in “taking the power back” from Wall Street firms trying to screw over the little guy and that this was a brave and principled move. That… is kind of stupid. Let’s be clear, this was not a popular revolt and it did not permanently correct or fix anything on Wall Street except to be a little smarter about when to short companies. I don’t think what they did was wrong or immoral per se, at least in this case, they were as profit motivated as anyone playing the stock market and many of the methods they were using could just as easily be used for much less savory ends. A lot of the memes that were being shown onscreen (“GME to the moon!”) that were also used to push crypto currency and other less successful get rich schemes and while the movie doesn’t completely ignore the “edgy” humor employed on that sub-reddit it does try to downplay it and avoid all that unsavoriness. The films mostly laudatory cameo via stock footage by Elon Musk kind of underscored the type of people we’re dealing with here and I’m not sure they should be valorized. In short, I view this whole situation as being a lot more dangerous and messy than the movie does and I wish it had been more interested in digging into that morass rather than chugging down the kool-aid that one side wants to sell. Despite that reservation, I do think that if you’re looking for a dramatization of this weird period in history this does have more going for it than the even more deranged documentary “Gamestop: Rise of the Players” so I can’t be too mad at it.
*** out of Five