For those with one eye trained on a news chyron for at least part of the day, it might seem a little too soon to be sitting down to watch Hollywood’s definitive retelling of 2021’s GameStop saga, an all-consuming financial soap opera that forced many of us to suddenly feign expertise in what a short squeeze is. But it’s perhaps fitting that the story, which trickled up from Reddit to Wall Street within weeks and was turned from a CNN ratings-winner to an Amazon bestseller within months, would become a film in just over two years.
It was an inevitable race to production with other projects announced around the same time but it was an adaptation of Ben Mezrich’s speedily written The Antisocial Network that won out, now known as Dumb Money, a slick crowd-pleaser that makes light work of a difficult story. For as juicy as the twists and turns may be they were mostly juicy to those who were educated on the specifics of not just the story but the world within which it was playing out. Hollywood’s ongoing obsession with framing tech tales as Shakespearean dramas, with recent films and shows based around the highs and lows of Uber, WeWork and Blackberry, has mostly required very little expertise from viewers going in. They’re familiar industry narratives, old stories with a new setting.
Dumb Money requires something a little extra, something that would usually require a no-distractions Wikipedia read, but wrapped up in an appealingly commercial package (Adam McKay’s The Big Short famously used Margot Robbie in a bath to detail the most convoluted financial terminology). In telling the story as an ensemble piece, not just inhabited by characters who are already well-versed on the ins and outs of the market, the screenwriters Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo find ways to translate it for the layman. There’s the man who started it all, Keith Gill (Paul Dano), who used Reddit and YouTube to gin up interest in GameStop stocks, supported by his equally invested wife (Shailene Woodley). There are the Wall Street suits (Seth Rogen, Vincent D’Onofrio and Nick Offerman) who went from laughing it off to crying over their bank accounts. There are the tech bros (Sebastian Stan and Rushi Kota) whose software allowed easy access to stocks. Then there are the various people who followed Keith’s advice, from a GameStop store worker (Anthony Ramos) to a single mum working as a nurse (America Ferrera) to a pair of students with ever-increasing loans (Myha’la Herrold and Talia Ryder).
It’s perilously close to being overstuffed (one more introduction would have tipped it over the edge) but a controlled and nimble script justifies the large ensemble, using each thread to quickly switch back and forth between the anger, ecstasy, disbelief and fear that seeped from conference to dorm room at the time. It was, and still is now, a period of mass disillusionment in the wealthy and the systems that protected them and without employing a heavy hand, we see how the loss of lives, jobs and freedom brought on by Covid helped to swirl it all into a perfect storm. The sudden obsession with the GameStop brand was rooted in a nostalgia for the days of the high street and the mall, both further destroyed by the pandemic and it’s easy to see how it became a symbol at the time for so many. Last year’s run of eat the rich movies, from The Menu to Triangle of Sadness to Glass Onion, were mostly based around a rather limited view of class politics (people with money = bad) and while Dumb Money is still fairly broad (a tad more characterisation wouldn’t have gone amiss), it offers up something a little more constructive, a rousing David and Goliath battle that’s hard not to find involving.
The world it’s trying to invite us into is often obnoxiously off-putting, filled with cat memes and confusing terminology, but Craig Gillespie, the director, does a decent job of simplifying it without censoring (we’re shown both the offensive words commonly thrown around by users and told of how anti-capitalist rhetoric often slipped into anti-semitic attacks). It’s a rare film about digital culture that feels well-modulated, as accessible for those within it as it is for those blissfully unaware. Gillespie, who has found a niche with poppy recent history retellings from I, Tonya to Pam & Tommy to Mike, clearly models his latest on the seminal 2010 drama The Social Network (even down to a sub-Ross and Reznor score) and while using this as inspiration does curb some of his brasher impulses (his eye-rolling tendency to over-rely on needle drops has been somewhat tempered here), it also reminds us that he’s no Fincher and that Schuker Blum and Angelo, as witty as their dialogue might often be, are no replacement for Sorkin. It’s a far more dispensable movie, quick and entertaining, but not as impactful, something to cheer for in the moment but nothing to think too deeply on once the cheers have died down.
Dumb Money is screening at the Toronto film festival and will be released in US cinemas on 15 September and Australia on 5 October.
