If you want to be amused and educated in a high-flying docudrama about a real incident on the stock market, you might choose The Big Short, which took itself too seriously. Much more entertaining and faster paced is the current Dumb Money, directed by Craig Gillespie and written by Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo. It tells about how volatile day trading can be as a little guy, Keith Gill (Paul Dano), from his modest home in Brockton, Mass., engineers GameStop stock to heights he and his loyal followers could never have dreamt of.
Although I know too little about this complex business of shorting, short squeeze, and gamma squeezing, I do appreciate the humanity of it all, almost Greek in its tragic potential, where the “dumb money,” as the big guys call the small investors, might just beat the hedge funder snobs at their game. That’s what Keith does as he whips up regular folk to invest in the declining video gaming store, potentially making them wealthy.
At the same time, the hedge-fund cowboys find themselves on the losing end because they have sunk their money in making the stock go low enough to give them a big profit in the loss. I may not fully understand the dynamic, but I can see hedge funders like Gabe Plotkin (Seth Rogen) lose all. He invested in short selling, betting against GameStock so that he lost big when the stock shot up. The days of getting rich off the future failure of small stocks like GameStop were over.
Most of all, Dumb Money brightly shows the excitement of investing and the reality of losing, while along the way family and friends, many investing because of humble Keith, find romance and camaraderie while experiencing the joys and sorrows of risk taking and being in it together. The use of social media to galvanize little investors and give instantaneous buy/sell power is the engine that roars for the working class and the entertainment of this frenetic adventure.
No better example of the film’s cool is Keith’s wife, Caroline (Shailene Woodley), who does not weep at loss but encourages him to be brave. Usually, it’s a thankless role with a hysterical wife—not so here, for she is composed and smart. Along with eccentric brother-in-law Kevin Gill (Pete Davidson) and a host of other underdeveloped characters, Dumb Money is a cursory study of a complicated world capable of comedy and tragedy at the same time. Fun it is from our safe seats in the theater.
Dumb Money
Director: Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya)
Screenplay: Lauren Schuker Blum (Orange is the New Black), Rebeca Angelo (Wolfman)
Cast: Paul Dano (The Fablemans), Pete Davidson (The King of Staten Island)
Run Time: 1h 45m
Rating: R
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts NPR’s It’s Movie Time and hosts Cinema Classics as well as podcasts Back Talk and Double Take out of WCBE 90.5 FM. Contact him at JohnDeSando52@gmail.com
