"Dumb Money" -- Movie Review

 

This week at Film at Lincoln Center, I attended a special screening of the new comedy “Dumb Money”, starring Paul Dano and Pete Davidson.

Synopsis

Major Wall Street players panic when an unpromising stock suddenly skyrockets.

Story

In 2021, people all across the country are suffering due to the COVID-19 pandemic – they are suffering due to the sickness and deaths of friends and family directly caused by the virus and they are also suffering economically as an indirect cause of the pandemic when many found themselves out of work.  Despite the struggles of the working class, the wealthy – in particular, those who were Wall Street big shots – have never been living better.  Many of those who found themselves struggling wanted to fight back, but how? 

Enter Keith Gill (Paul Dano).  Working for a stockbrokerage company in Massachusetts, Keith learns how to execute trades on his own and how to read and interpret the performance of individual companies.  He notices that the stock price of one publicly traded company is rather low, and considers Wall Street’s unfavorable evaluation of the company unjust; that company is GameStop, a video game store located in many malls across America.  The experts decide that since most people are playing games by streaming over the Internet, GameStop will soon turn into a dinosaur.  Keith disagrees and invests his life savings in GameStop, driving its stock price higher.

Keith goes on social media under the name Roaring Kitty to share his story and his stock tip with others.  His followers take his advice and begin buying stock in GameStop; some – including Keith – become millionaires (at least on paper).  Others, who could only afford to invest a fraction of the amount, are able to double or even triple their net worth as the price of the stock increases ever higher.  Millionaires and billionaires who are supposed to be the financial experts suddenly find themselves panicking as their corporate assets are dwindling daily.  Will they be able to fight back and regain their foothold on the economic ladder?   

Review

“Dumb Money” is a rollicking new comedy for the Occupy Wall Street crowd.  True, it may seem a little late in the sense that “The Big Short” came out a number of years ago (also, both are based on true life events), but this may also be considered an update since it takes place during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, whereas “The Big Short” was more recession-focused.  Whether you regard that as detrimental to the quality of the film may depend on which side of the political spectrum you lean more towards (this movie tends to lean more to the Bernie Sanders supporters rather than the trickle-down economy theorists). 

Although the screenplay follows multiple characters, it isn’t that terribly difficult to follow the story; part of the reason for that is because the characters are so uniquely drawn, their individuality stands out.  The other reason is likely due to the fact that many of those characters are played by stars familiar to the viewing audience, making it easier to keep track of who’s who and what their piece in this complicated puzzle is in relation to the rest of the story (as well as their relationship to each other). 

This movie makes clear who the good guys and the bad guys are and why it’s so easy to root for the good guys (or at the very least, root against the bad guys).  There are references made to this being the equivalent of The French Revolution, which is a fair comparison since it was about how the middle class held disdain for the high-living aristocracy who forced the lower class to struggle in order to support the ostentatious lifestyle of the despotic ruler Louis XVI.  As the saying goes, history rarely repeats itself, but it does frequently rhyme.