Foster cashes in behind the camera
Money Monster marks timely turn in Oscar winner’s career
During a chat promoting NEW YO R K her latest directorial effort, Money Monster, Oscar-winning actress Jodie Foster takes time to offer an assurance.
“I will never stop acting, but I’ve just been focusing on directing lately,” says Foster before heading to the Cannes Film Festival with her latest movie. “I’m 53 and the world has changed, and I don’t want to play the same person that I did when I was 25.”
With that settled, it’s on to her next movie production after she expended her creative efforts directing episodes of Netflix shows House of Cards and Orange is the New Black.
For Money Monster, she’s strictly behind the camera to focus on collaborating with headliners George Clooney and Julia Roberts.
The comedy-drama features Clooney as Lee Gates, an egocentric TV host of a wacky financial show begrudgingly run by producer Patty (Roberts), who’s on the verge of making a career change.
Their routine is shattered when a distraught viewer (Jack O’Connell) holds Gates hostage at gunpoint during a show after taking Gates’ bad stock advice and losing his savings in the process. So Money Monster is equal parts thriller and satire, therefore the movie relies on Foster’s deft touch as a filmmaker.
“It’s a big ride of a film,” the director says. “It’s an experiment and a challenge for me, because I come from making very personal films, and this generally has its foot in the genre world.”
In fact, Foster says that she initiated the creative dilemma when she decided to dive into the Money Monster project.
“It was way more farcical in the beginning, and when I came on I took out a bit of the farce and the satire to find the right recipe,” she says.
“I do feel like it has a stronger thriller element. But it wouldn’t be the movie I originally loved if it didn’t have the comedy and the absurdity.”
It does seem like the right moment for Money Monster.
For one, the U.S. presidential race, thanks to the Donald Trump campaign, pushes the envelope of ludicrousness. “Who knew that this year’s elections were going to bring so much fodder for comedy?” Foster says.
Then there’s the melding of reality TV and news shows: “That world of entertainment has become a fixture in our lives,” she adds.
Third, there’s the contradictory dichotomy of the digital age.
“We’re closer than we’ve ever been and we’re communicating constantly, but there seems to be more separation in our day-to-day lives.”
And finally, there’s some 21st century irony in the film’s turning point, Foster says. “Technology is the bad guy yet some characters come together using it to bring down the bad guy.”
Of course, the casting of Clooney and Roberts made all of the ingredients, obvious and implied, blend nicely.
“I really don’t know how they do what they do,” says Foster. “Yes, they are solid actors but they really are movie stars.
“I don’t think I bought into that idea 100 per cent until I worked with them on this movie. You can’t take your eyes off of them.
“Julia was working mostly to a green screen and playback which is a testament to how great and real and powerful Julia Roberts is.”
Clooney, Foster suggests, has his own special magic.
“He’s able to make fun of himself, and he allows us to see the flawed guy, but he also has the humanity to allow audiences to stay with him the whole way. I don’t know how they do it.”
Foster must have some sort of idea, after a career spanning more than four decades.
She first earned recognition for her Academy Award-nominated performance as the child prostitute in Taxi Driver, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year.
Oscars arrived with her portrayal of the rape victim in 1988’s The Accused and her role as FBI trainee Clarice Starling on the trail of a serial killer in The Silence of the Lambs.
Before Money Monster, she directed The Beaver in 2011 and Home for the Holidays in 1995. Her big-screen directorial debut was 1991’s Little Man Tate.
It’s telling that after her complex experiences as a performer and filmmaker, she’s transformed into a more practical on-set leader.
“I’m smart enough to know that I can’t change anyone in 20 minutes so I really try to bring out the best in what everybody has to offer,” Foster says.
“I also try to hire people who understand their characters and have a lot to say about them, and then I prepare before filming, and then I go fast during the shoot, and I tell the actors where to stand.”
The best thrillers start simply, even quietly. “Who’s that guy?” asks Julia Roberts’ character, and we’re off to the races.
Money Monster is both the name of this tense cat-andmouse game from director Jodie Foster, and the title of the show within the show, a bombastic investment-advice program hosted by huckster Lee Gates (George Clooney). It’s the perfect role for Clooney, who mixes smarm and charm, flash and sass, into a cocktail that is drinkable if still a touch bitter.
Then again, it doesn’t hurt Lee’s likability factor that his adversary is a disgruntled investor who may have more ire than brains. He storms the studio during the show’s opening minutes, determined to get the real truth about how a surefire stock called Ibis just lost $800 million overnight, wiping out his alreadymeagre life savings.
Kyle Budwell (up-and-coming British actor Jack O’Connell), pulls a gun, straps Lee into an explosive vest, puts his thumb on the detonator, and demands answers. Not the return of his $60,000 — as he sees it, he’s there on behalf of every similarly bankrupted little guy.
The third corner in the triangle is Patty Fenn (Roberts), the director of Money Monster and, more specially, of Lee. With a microphone connected to an earbud that only he can hear, she functions as a combination of conscience, tactician and Google.
She is also the Supreme Being in the studio, the Deus in the machina.
When Kyle starts making demands, she’s level-headed enough to keep the show on the air, push the police negotiators to the side, and even tell the camera operators to pull in a little and lose that shadow on the gunman’s face. Just because she’s trying to save her host’s life doesn’t mean she can’t also keep producing must-see TV.
The movie does a good job of blurring the line between lifeand-death drama and realityTV entertainment, in part by replicating that schism itself. It’s a solid piece of entertainment, with more than a few chuckles wrung from the nail-biting plot; yet at its heart it’s a story of financial instability and, possibly, corporate malfeasance. Business meets pleasure.
And the characters’ motivations and relationships remain in flux, as well.
“I’m just a guy on TV” is Lee’s opening bargaining position, but he turns out to have some hidden depths.
Similarly, Kyle’s reasoning is at once simpler and more complex than it first appears, and the old negotiating tactic of having his girlfriend talk to him creates an unexpected result. By late in the film, there’s an unusual humanshield arrangement that audiences won’t see coming.
Foster, directing from a script by Jamie Linden, Alan DiFiore and Jim Kouf, lets the hostage drama play out in the foreground while slyly building a secondary layer of drama.
This one involves Ibis’ chief communications officer (Caitriona Balfe), desperately trying to track down her CEO (Dominic West) or one of the mysterious “quants” whose stock-trading algorithm seems to be at the heart of this meltdown. (So convenient: blame it on the technology or, failing that, the programmers.)
Solid actors fill out the cast and keep the action jogging ahead, sometimes literally.
And while the results won’t inform viewers nearly as well as a doc like Inside Job or last year’s best-adapted-writing Oscar winner The Big Short, the entertainment value is topnotch.