Dumb Money Review

The current political climate can be best described as hostile to Wall Street and the super-rich. Films like The Menu and Triangle of Sadness had eat-the-rich sentiments and they have plenty of films condemning the actions of Wall Street. Dumb Money shows a working-class revolt against the stock market.

Keith Gill (Paul Dano) is a financial advisor, a self-taught investor, and YouTuber. He makes a bold move by buying $50,000 worth of GameStop shares during the Pandemic. Keith uses his YouTube channel and Reddit to promote why he thinks investing in GameStop is a wise idea and that Wall Street is trying to short-sell the company for its own benefit. Keith ends up leading a movement of small investors who push GameStop’s stock price up. However, the financial elites are not going down without a fight.

The Banking and Financial sectors are some of the most unpopular within society. They are seen as predators who leach off the hard work of others and live a life of excess, and if they fail then they’ll get bailed out because they’re ‘too big to fail.’ There have been films that have looked at this reckless culture where the pursuit of money was the thing that mattered, like the Wall Street movies, Rogue Trader, and The Boiler Room. One of the most famous films about the financial sector was The Big Short which looked at the people who predicted the 2008 Financial Crash.

Dumb Money aimed to be The Big Short for Gen X. Both films have an ensemble cast of characters based across the country who were tied together by a certain event. The Big Short was about the incoming financial crash whilst Dumb Money was Reddit’s stock revolt. Dumb Money was able to centre itself around a person instead of a more abstract concept of sub-prime montages. It helped to make the film a digestible experience.

Dumb Money had prestige behind the camera. It was directed by Craig Gillespie, who is best known for the excellent I, Tonya, the biopic about Tonya Harding, whilst the writers were Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo who both worked on Netflix’s Orange is the New Black. They have experience giving a story a comedic edge and provided that for Dumb Money. It was needed to make a potentially dry film more entertaining and it was needed considering the film was about a man in his basement bringing down a major investment fund. It’s pretty absurd if it weren’t a real event.

Dumb Money aimed to tackle a lot of ideas and themes. The most obvious was the class themes. This was a film about students, nurses, and retail workers who were trying to stick it to elites. Anthony Scaramucci, Donald Trump’s former Communications Director appeared in a news clip describing the movement as the French Revolution against Wall Street. Dumb Money stood out because it was a stock market film whose focus was on small investors.

Dumb Money does go over some familiar territory. Characters point out that the rules were different for the financial sector. When Gabe Plotkin (Seth Rogen) was in financial trouble he was able to get a bailout from other businesses, just like the banks were bailed out by governments around the globe. Added to this the stock brokers and hedge funds were able to put pressure on other businesses that were used by small inventors, like Reddit and Robinhood.

Dumb Money showed bankers to be people who profited off other people’s hard work or misery. They don’t create or sell anything, like a store and Keith’s logic in investing in GameStop was loads of gamers still buy physical media. Added to that the film states that the Robinhood App didn’t charge a commission for trades, which led to the question, how did it make money? The film ended up aligning with my worldview about physical media and the current digital landscape.

The film highlighted the politically charged climate of 2020, and they managed it without referring to the 2020 election. It was a time when the Black Lives Matter movement was prominent and there was graffiti against the police when Keith commuted into Boston. Yet, the founders of Robinhood tried to co-op this political and economic outrage as a way to market their app even though they were in league with the same bankers the Occupy Wall Street movement was against. When the bankers had to testify before Congress, they had to think of the PR angle and avoid looking too elitist.

Dumb Money also looked at the plight of Millennials and Gen-Xers. Keith was a financial analyst and had a wife and child but they weren’t able to afford a house. Keith’s brother, Kevin (Pete Davidson) had to work as a DoorDash delivery driver since that was the only work he could get. Amanda Ferrera played a nurse and a single mum who had thousands of dollars of debt, yet was keeping the healthcare system going during the pandemic. Myha’la Herrold and Taila Ryder college students whose education was disturbed and had the privilege of large student debts. While the bankers were able to live in luxury during the crisis. Because of all the characters’ financial plights, it ensured there was a sense of tension since they could cash out and wipe out their debts but it would have disrupted the movement.

Dumb Money was a film that had a lot going on because of its subject matter and big themes and was able to tell it in an engaging manner.