Invests in women
Bankable. Running time: 100 minutes. Rated R (profanity). Now playing. ★★ ½
WOMEN in finance are a tough bunch, with the culture — and their small numbers — still stacked against them. “Equity,” a female-created and -funded film, tackles the subject with subtlety in its depiction of an investment banker (Anna Gunn) trying to keep an IPO on track.
Gunn’s Naomi Bishop is a veteran Wall Streeter recently dogged by a client’s claim that she “rubbed some people the wrong way,” as her boss (Lee Tergesen) puts it. Is it sexism? Hard to say for sure, though we clearly see she has to walk more of a presentational tightrope than her male colleagues — including the swaggering Michael (James Purefoy), with whom she’s having a vaguely illicit romance. Meanwhile, her second in command, the younger Erin (Sarah Megan Thomas), is balancing her own sizable ambition with the early stages of a pregnancy, which, though wanted, is a career threat she views with low-level panic.
As Naomi and Erin helm the IPO of a Facebook-like company — complete with Erin’s fending off come-ons from its fratty CEO (Samuel Roukin) — an old college friend of Naomi’s (Alysia Reiner), now working for the government, investigates possible corruption within her firm.
Director Meera Menon (“Farah Goes Bang”) gets captivating performances from Gunn, Thomas and Reiner, but “Equity” loses steam as its second half descends into the paces of a fairly unremarkable thriller, one in which the business of being a woman in the industry is increasingly less central. Ultimately, I found the story surrounding “Equity” — that it is a movie about women on Wall Street, financed largely by actual women on Wall Street — more interesting than the movie itself, but it does contain its share of memorable moments.
“I like money,” Naomi says, at a panel on women in finance. “I like knowing that I have it.” That she views this as a radical disclosure — compared with the male rallying cry of “Greed is good” from all the way back in the 1980s — is the most thought-provoking aspect of Menon’s film.