Review: Dumb Money (2023)
In which the billionaire has a very large pig
Dumb Money (2023)
Directed by Craig Gillespie
Paul Dano as Keith Gill in “Dumb Money“
A classic underdog movie, "Dumb Money" is about the real-life amateur stock trader Keith Gill. In 2021, he rallied other ordinary people to buy lots of stock in the failing retail videogame retailer GameStop. This led to a massive temporary run-up in the stock price, enriching many of the amateurs and giving a very satisfying haircut to the hedge funds that shorted it.
That's pretty much the whole movie -- no disrespect to the screenwriters, but it's the kind of thing that writes itself. For a director, that means the main job is to get out of the way, so it's fitting that the gig was given to a journeyman, Craig Gillespie, who has since 2007 helmed a basket of miscellaneous indie, action, and comedy films like "I, Tonya" with Margot Robbie and "Cruella" with Emma Stone.
Thus we can pay attention to the fine comic performances by Paul Dano as Gill, and Vincent D'Onofrio and Seth Rogan as billionaire investors Gabe Plotkin and Steve Cohen, who short GameStop and are left holding the bag when the stock skyrockets. Anyone who's seen the film's trailer is familiar with D'Onofrio's Eeyore-like moan:
Mrs. Cohen: How much did we lose today?
Cohen: A billion.
Mrs. Cohen: And yesterday?
Cohen: A billion.
Vincent D'Onofrio in “Dumb Money“
"Dumb money" is what professional capitalists, the executives and employees of Wall Street and Silicon Valley investment companies, call the decisions that ordinary people like you and me make when we try to participate in the investment markets. They call it that first because we pick stocks and other investments without knowing as much as they do, and also because we invest and risk our own money, whereas they only invest other people's money and have no personal risk. Suppose they buy a stagnant company, sell off its assets, and then declare bankruptcy. They don't lose a dime; the only people who do are the employees and pension beneficiaries of the now-dead company. In this story the vulture investors are "smart" and their victims are "dumb," not they that have any opportunity to be smart in the same way. Here it's instructive to remember the statement made by Donald Trump during one of the 2016 Presidential debates, when he said, in response to Hillary Clinton's accusation that he paid no income taxes, "That makes me smart!"1
So the good guys in this movie are Gill, who goes live on social media with a call to other small investors to buy, everyone at once, the stock of the moribund GameStop. They not only ride the stock from around $4 to over $400, but in so doing they raise a huge middle finger to hedge funds that have shorted the same stock. The hedge funds lose billions. It's never explained exactly where those billions go; the amount lost by the hedge funds is much greater than the total of what Gill and his followers gain. I don't understand it, I only know that if you short a stock and it goes up instead of down, you have to pay. That's all you need to know to enjoy this movie.
I was reminded of the film that launched Jonathan Demme into fame in 1980, "Melvin and Howard." In that comedy, obscure actor Paul LeMat shines as the bumbling Melvin Dummar, who claimed to have rescued secretive tycoon Howard Hughes from the desert outside Las Vegas and consequently becoming the beneficiary of Hughes' will. Dummar was a fraud and a forger, but the way Paul Dano plays Keith Gill reminded me of the way LeMat played Dummar -- and Gill was evidently much more pure-hearted.
Jason Robards (l.) and Paul LeMat in “Melvin and Howard“
Paul Dano, as Gill, has the role of a lifetime here, imbuing his character with an almost spiritual aspect. The movie makes Keith Gill a Frank Capra-style David who takes on Goliath because he resents Goliath's propensity to squash retail investors and the victims of private equity firms that suck the life out of acquired companies. He is scrupulous as he leads this battle: he posts his own investment balance sheet every day, after market close. He isn't sponsored or backed by anyone but is just a guy who follows a Reddit forum for small-money investors and publishes videos with tips on YouTube. This purity, as much as anything else, probably drove many of his viewers to trust his opinions and invest likewise.
If you can't relate to Gill, then surely you can believe in America Ferrera, fresh off her role in "Barbie" and once again playing a working person -- here a nurse taking care of COVID patients during the pandemic. She provides a reliable anchor for the film, one of the few characters who isn't wacky. Gill's own anchor is his supportive wife, played by Shailene Woodley as unglamorous as Shailene Woodley can be.
The one moving aspect of the movie is the shots of empty streets and schools and shopping malls during lockdown. The working folks in the film wear masks in public, at work, or at school; the billionaires and their colleagues and families don't, but their servants have to. It's the first feature I've seen that tries to capture the atmosphere of the COVID years, though it shows college students being much more relaxed about COVID than they really were in early 2021, if they were on campus at all.
The day this movie was released in the U.S., Sep. 15, the Financial Times published an op-ed about the film's take on the movie and what it says about markets. (The FT article is paywalled but you can read it at this link.) Mocking the film and its characters, the piece goes to lengths to explain why the movie is wrong about technical details about how markets work. Creating a mania for an unfavored stock has "pernicious effects," the writer alleges, and to make it completely clear whose side she's on, says "It left us wanting to be friends with Vincent D’Onofrio’s Stevie Cohen. Romeo the pig makes an appearance!"
Yes, the film does show an enormous live pig the size of a Mini-Cooper in the billionaire's office. I thought this was an example of the movie extending a metaphor a bit too far. It's revealing that it's true.2
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/a-lean-toward-clinton-among-one-group-of-undecided-north-carolina-voters/2016/09/27/ff271b2e-8469-11e6-92c2-14b64f3d453f_story.html
https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-cohen-did-have-a-pig-2015-6?op=1
This looks great. I hope it is available to stream soon