Dumb Money

One of the downsides of releasing a movie based on a true story very soon after the events in question is that you don’t actually know the whole story. Some key details won’t leak out for years, the full ramifications have yet land, and some of the specific events likely remain unresolved, especially those involving lawsuits or Congressional action. But sometimes the public interest is so strong that filmmakers feel the desire to dive in and strike while the iron is hot, betting the public won’t lose interest in the mean time.

So it goes with Dumb Money. It’s based on the The Antisocial Network, a book covering the January 2021 GameStop short squeeze, proposed mere days after the peak value of the stock. The movie was optioned a couple days later, less than a week after that peak, while chaos still reigned and the actual text was still a glimmer in Ben Mezrich’s eye. I kind of get it. A David vs. Goliath story in which the common main prevails against Wall Street? With David being a hoard of Redditors? Seems like a perfect story for this moment of rising inequality driven by the stupendously wealthy, especially in the age of politics following Occupy Wall Street (which is brought up a couple times in the film). The lack of breathing room around the incident gave me pause, but I am interested in the sequence of events, and I do think it has dramatic potential, so I hoped for the best.

Dumb Money focuses on Keith Gill (Paul Dano), a 30-something financial analyst by day and YouTuber under the name RoaringKitty by night. He’s bullish on GameStop’s stock, a company he’s loved since childhood, and convinces a bunch of his fellow Redditors to invest while investing a boatload of his own savings. When enough of them buy in to make an impact, and Wall Street begins to take notice, it becomes a moral crusade, to take the fight to those who would tear down a beloved company and scrap it for parts. And a chance for the little guy to finally have his day.

Along with Keith being our protagonist, we also follow a handful of strangers who hang on his every word. Jenny Campbell (America Ferrera) is a nurse who has a bunch of debt. Riri (Myha’la Herrold) and her girlfriend Harmony (Talia Ryder) are college students drowning in loans. Marco (Anthony Ramos) is a GameStop employee with no money in the bank. We also periodically drop in on Robinhood’s founders (Sebastian Stan and Rushi Kota), the CEO of Melvin Capital (Seth Rogan), and the CEO of Citadel LLC (Nick Offerman). Not to mention Keith’s wife Caroline (Shailene Woodley) and brother Kevin (Pete Davidson), both of whom serve as entry points for the audience, as they’re less knowledgeable about the market than Keith, and more skeptical of this whole shebang (especially Kevin).

With the exception of Caroline, we spend at least a few scenes with each of those characters. Which illustrates the movie’s biggest problem: a lack of commitment. You can have a movie with a ton of named characters, most played by recognizable actors: Oppenheimer and Barbie both just pulled it off. But Dumb Money is all over the place, trying to get you invested in everyone, which is a mistake. As a result, it can’t decide if it wants to be a character study of Keith, or a look at the power of the collective, or explain the investor actions and timeline of events, or just look at how the economic systems screws over most people. Instead, it tries to do all of those things, and whiffs on each.

I’d guess most people were hoping for some insight into what happened, to come away with a better understanding of a complex economic situation, a la The Big Short. It would be a grand undertaking, especially given how little many people know of the modern financial system and stock market in particular, but would definitely be worthwhile. However, that’s not really Gillespie’s concern. While there is some talk of particular terms and interactions in the stock and finance world, the pieces weren’t really put together. The motivations and goals of many of the involved parties is barely touched on, and the mechanisms being exploited aren’t well covered. If you followed the news coverage at the time, you probably know almost all of what this movie cared to explain. Sure, Keith gives a couple little tidbits about why he thinks GameStop is undervalued, but that’s about it. And it’s not even like those tips ended up being relevant. While he convinced a nontrivial amount of people to invest on those criteria, the squeeze was a dogpile of retail traders looking to screw over Wall Street, not due to some organic value that Keith saw when no one else did.

It could focus on Keith himself, except that would somewhat undermine the movie’s whole point of how the powerful are only such because the people are divided. Grounding the movie around one person doesn’t necessarily dilute that point. But the movie feels the need to make him a hero, and in doing so injects some additional, irrelevant drama. Namely, a half-assed thing about him running an almost 4-minute mile, and they bring up the death of his sister Sarah a few times. All of it ends up falling flat, and his personality just seems to be “GameStop”.

It could try to show us the impacts, good and bad, of the whole situation on other people. But they don’t get enough screen time or depth to really hit. It’s also way too focused on them as uncomplicated victims to feel like real people. And none of them can get real arcs, either, which is unsurprising given the plethora of other characters we need to check in with. Marco technically gets one, but it’s incredibly unsatisfying, owing in part to it being as small as possible, despite being relatable.

Instead, the movie chooses a middle path, kind of plotting out the steps along the way without really saying what’s going on, rotating between characters feeling anxious, all broken up by montages of stock memes, TikToks, and news coverage. Every now and then, some of those character moments are sprinkled in, but they make zero impression, owing to us not caring one iota about the people involved. So it’s just floating along, an unfocused series of “and then this happened”.

For the vast majority of the movie, the only conflict is people telling the characters that they’re crazy. The minor characters bring up stocks to anyone who will listen (which turns out to be everyone?), all of whom inform them the Street always wins. Even Keith gets barely any pushback: he’s anxious about bringing his idea to r/WallStreetBets, but very quickly gets everyone on board and celebrating him. So it’s more precise to say the conflict is tissue paper: there, but easily brushed aside. The only actual tension emerges later, as each character wrings their hands over whether to sell or hold. Which is exactly as exciting as it sounds, especially since the movie has no interest in examining the negative impacts on any of the retail investors.

Another issue is explaining r/WallStreetBets itself, or Reddit more generally. Internet message board culture is a very strange thing if you’re not familiar with it, with lots of alien behavior. What’s with all the crudely made photoshops and GIFs? Why do they keep telling people to “hodl”? Why do they insist on calling their peers “retard” and “dumbcock” and telling them to kill themselves? The aforementioned montages attempt to capture these behaviors, but cannot begin to explain them. It’s a challenge that anyone trying to bring an internet story to the broader culture needs to grapple with, and Gillepsie abstains, figuring you’ll just ignore what you don’t understand. But it’s an alienating experience, even speaking as someone who does get it, but doesn’t participate.

Which means that when r/WallStreetBets is temporarily suspended for hate speech at the peak of GameStop’s value, it feels conspiratorial rather than the reality of Reddit trying to be responsible. That very well may be the intent, but it comes across more as “tinfoil hat” than “smoking gun”. It doesn’t help that the movie acts like Reddit is the only social media that exists, but that’s more of a nitpick than a true problem.

It does land a few moments in the third act, as Gillespie crystallizes the message he’s trying to send: that the system is rigged against the little guy. That even structures supposedly there to level the playing field really only further exacerbate inequality. It’s been present throughout, but he gets a couple alright moments in there stating it. Unfortunately, they also highlight how he’s ignored much of the rest of the movie to get here and make his point. It doesn’t help that his message is nothing new in any medium, and isn’t presented in a particularly interesting way. It doesn’t tie everything together in the way it would if it was the culmination of something.

None of the acting is anything special here, either. I don’t think anyone is downright bad, but they’re unable to rise above the lackluster script, even Dano. Kevin is a somewhat fun character in just how much of a schmuck he is, but as this comedy has few laughs, he just feels out of place.

There’s something I find incredibly frustrating when the first high profile attempt at explaining a major event is this poor. I worry that it will cause people to write off the actual event itself, or else scare off studios from making a more serious, more in depth exploration of it. There are actually two documentaries already out, both which beat this by well over a year, as well as some books and online articles, so there’s plenty of material for further investigation. But this so clumsily tried to cash in on a phenomenon which the public hasn’t thought about in quite some time, which neglects to look at any of the dark side, and which has nothing interesting to say. It’s a waste of time, one which you won’t come out of with any new insights.

When even Dano isn’t enough to save a movie, you know you’re in trouble.