DUMB MONEY - Mark Reviews Movies

Dumb Money, Sony Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 14, 2023

Is it just too soon for the story of Dumb Money? To be sure, screenwriters Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo's adaptation of Ben Mezrich's non-fiction book The Antisocial Network does a fine enough job explaining the basics of the stock craze/rebellion that took place at the beginning of 2021. This is recent and, for those who might not know or care about the stock market, fairly confusing history, so the fact that director Craig Gillespie's movie makes clear and simple sense of what happened not so long ago is something of an accomplishment.

This movie is, though, primarily about what happened. It's less concerned with how or even why it did occur and only mildly interested in the people involved in this battle between hedge fund executives and the "dumb money" of retail traders. That absence of a human element that's as plain and simple as the constant explanations of what these characters are doing or hoping will happen, though, is more notable than it should be. This isn't a documentary, after all, where facts and figures and dates and archival footage are to be expected. It's a dramatization of real-life events, and without a clean focus on the people affecting and being affected by those events, the movie comes up decidedly short as drama.

If there is a central focal point, it belongs to Keith Gill (Paul Dano), an official financial analyst for an insurance company by day and a growing internet sensation during his off hours. Online, Keith has two handles, although his face and stock analysis would become famous as "Roaring Kitty." In the midst of the global COVID-19 pandemic, Keith gained an audience, especially when he started to champion GameStop, the video game retailer that most people—and some major Wall Street hedge funds—saw as a failing business.

At the story's start, Keith has invested his family's savings into the company's stock, assuming the low price was an inaccurate evaluation of the retailer's future. His audience on various social media platforms and online forums start to believe him. It's an added bonus that, in buying more and more shares of the company's stock, the hedge funds, worth tens of billions of dollars, betting against them could stand to lose billions of dollars, too.

Those are the basics that most people know about this story, and the rest of the movie's narrative gets a bit more into the weeds of it. We meet various hedge fund executives, such as Seth Rogen's Gabe Plotkin and Vincent D'Onofrio's Steve Cohen, who are shorting the stocks—basically putting money down on the company's eventual failure. They're meant to be the obvious antagonists here—set against the working folks, indebted college students, and eager upstarts like Keith, who think betting on GameStop could make them a small or sizeable fortune.

All of these characters are so broadly presented, though, that they come across as not much more than self-involved eccentrics or, in the case of Gabe and his worried wife (played by Olivia Thirlby), a funhouse-mirror reflection of the uncertainty of the story's heroes. It's likely not an intentional miscalculation—just an accidental effect of spreading the narrative far too thin.

Most of that story is devoted to people like Keith, his supportive wife Caroline (Shailene Woodley), his loser brother Kevin (Pete Davidson), and a collection of other stock-investing hopefuls from across the country. There's Jenny (America Ferrera), a single mother of two and a nurse, who's in debt, lonely, and thinks the "short squeeze" on the video game shop's stock could be her way to some financial comfort. There are college students Harmony (Talia Ryder) and Riri (Myha'la Herrold), who find love with each other and for internet memes, with a shared dream of paying off their student loan debts. Finally, there's Marcus (Anthony Ramos), who works at a GameStop store and is fed up with a minimum-wage job with reduced hours during a pandemic.

It's a lot, of course, as the screenplay jumps between all of these characters and stories, as well as Vlad Tenev (Sebastian Stan) and Baiju Bhatt (Rushi Kota), the makers of the democratic stock-investment app that makes all this retail trading easy. With so much to cover in such little time and with only the class warfare theme to guide it, though, the movie ultimately doesn't have much to say beyond the obvious (while also downplaying or entirely writing off some of the darker elements of the online movement).

Some people win. Some of the losers game the system to stop the bleeding, turning those potential winners into losers overnight. It's a rigged and rotten deal, summarized by a Big Speech that, while it may have actually happened, only serves to remind us that these characters have mostly been repeating these exact points, in some way or another, over and over again throughout the entire story.

As for what it all means, that's another reason Dumb Money might have arrived too soon. We're still living through the immediate aftermath of this event. The movie might be a fine primer for what happened, but it also comes up short as an examination of what it means for a future that, well, hasn't happened yet.

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