It's tough to find the right perspective for a film about true events as recent as those depicted in director Craig Gillespie's Dumb Money. Gillespie and screenwriters Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo, working from Ben Mezrich's nonfiction book The Antisocial Network, don't necessarily understand the full financial impact of the GameStop stock short squeeze of 2021, because there hasn't been enough time for it to make a difference (or be rendered irrelevant). But Dumb Money still captures something vital and meaningful about its time period, with the earned hindsight that comes from living through such accelerated traumatic circumstances.
That general trauma isn't the GameStop situation, but the ongoing pandemic that was at its height during the period when Dumb Money takes place. It's partly because so many people are stuck at home, living their lives online, that small-time financial analyst and YouTuber Keith Gill (Paul Dano) is able to rally such a large number of investors around his idea of buying stock in GameStop. In 2020, Keith tells his followers on YouTube and in the Reddit forum Wall Street Bets that he's bullish on the flailing video-game retailer, whose stock has been shorted by heavy-hitter hedge funds.
As more and more so-called retail investors buy shares in GameStop, the price of the shares soars, and Keith and his supporters get very rich — at least on paper. Because of the nature of shorting, the rising stock price means that the monolithic hedge funds start losing money, and when billionaires' bottom lines are threatened, they spring into action. Thus Dumb Money is presented as a battle between struggling everyday people and the ultrarich elites, although the truth is more complex than that. Still, the filmmakers give the audience a clear rooting interest, simplifying complicated financial concepts into relatable personal stakes without coming across as condescending.
Dano makes for an appealing, sympathetic everyman, a devoted husband and father who approaches his newfound online fame with appropriate skepticism. In the roles of the real-life billionaire Wall Street insiders who were challenged by the populist GameStop rally, Seth Rogen, Nick Offerman, Vincent D'Onofrio and Sebastian Stan are suitably slimy without turning into cartoon villains. The filmmakers invent several composite characters to represent the huge number of retail investors, including a nurse (America Ferrera), a GameStop store employee (Anthony Ramos) and a pair of college students (Talia Ryder and Myha'la Herrold), and each gets their share of heartfelt character development, grounding the abstract financial dealings in genuine human interactions.
Keith's story is grounded in his relationships, too, especially with his slacker brother Kevin (Pete Davidson), who provides a bemused outsider perspective. Kevin works as a food delivery driver, and Dumb Money effectively highlights the position of frontline workers during lockdown, which is a constant looming concern over everything that happens. As much as it's an entertaining and informative story about a financial scandal, Dumb Money is one of the best narrative films yet made about the COVID pandemic, perfectly capturing the eeriness and unease of that moment in time. Seeing the unmasked billionaires surrounded by silent, fully masked household employees conveys as much about those people as any snarky dialogue exchange.
Gillespie doesn't go overboard on the snark, and Dumb Money isn't smug or self-referential like Adam McKay's The Big Short, its most obvious predecessor. Like Gillespie's I, Tonya, it's a funny but empathetic portrayal of people who've been reduced to punchlines in news articles. It may end on a slightly unearned note of optimism, but that's exactly the kind of attitude that allowed Keith and his followers to achieve their unlikely success. ♦
DUMB MONEY
