GOLD PLATED
Bre-X-based flick glitters, but isn’t a solid strike
Matthew McConaughey has a thing for gold. In 2005 he starred in Sahara as adventurer Dirk Pitt, searching for long-lost Confederate bullion in Africa. (Alas, plans for a Pitt franchise didn’t pan out.) Three years later, he and Kate Hudson were looking for Caribbean treasure in Fool’s Gold. That film is notable as the zenith of McConaughey’s topless acting days.
More recently, a more mature McConaughey has been racking up awards-season gold in Dallas Buyers Club, TV’s True Detective and more. Gold, from director Stephen Gaghan (Syriana), looks set to meld the two McConaugheys — it’s a tale of hubris and core samples that took an Oscar-hopeful end-ofyear bow in the U.S. before opening more widely in January.
But the actor probably needn’t write any acceptance speeches for this one. They say you’re only as good as the material, and the screenplay, based loosely on the Bre-X scandal of the 1990s, is a seriously messy affair that changes its point of view several times. Is McConaughey’s character, mining executive Kenny Wells, living this story as we watch it unfold? Is he recalling it in voice-over? Being interviewed by what seems to be a serious reporter (Toby Kebbell)?
It’s hard to know, just as it’s difficult to guess how closely the plot will stick to the Bre-X fiasco. (Maybe the ending has been changed; I’m not telling.) Screenwriters Patrick Massett and John Zinman switch the time period to the 1980s, remove all trace of it being a Canadian story, rename everyone and sex up the characters. The lone holdout on this last front is McConaughey himself, who shaved his head and put on 45 pounds for the role, making me glad he keeps his shirt on.
Kenny has a dream about Indonesian gold, so he tracks down prospector Mike Acosta (Edgar Ramirez) and convinces the man to help him find the motherlode. Mike obligingly takes him to a depression in the green hills of the Indonesian jungle, “like a giant left a footprint walking away.” That’s the place, he says.
Sure enough, core samples reveal an eighth of an ounce of gold per ton of ore. What, you’re not an expert in extractive metallurgy? That’s OK. An eighth of an ounce is a lot. Kenny and Mike are sitting on the gold strike of the decade, and soon the financial world comes calling — Corey Stoll as a slick New York investor, Bruce Greenwood as a vaguely threatening mining magnate eager to take over the claim.
There’s also Bryce Dallas Howard as Kenny’s girlfriend, presumably because the filmmakers thought the movie needed a pretty face. She doesn’t have much else to do but look good in this thankless role.
Gaghan plots an entertaining roller-coaster course for the film, though he does rely on a limited number of dramatic tricks. With just two hours of screen time to fill, you should have no more than one Champagne-fuelled scene of celebration, one moment of positivity laid low by a sudden phone call and one heated argument taking place behind a muffling window. I counted three instances of each.
The film remains beautiful to look at — lush, Indonesian jungles, boxy ’80s automobiles and suits — and has a few moments of screenwriting sublimity, as when Mike tells Kenny that when Columbus petitioned Spanish royalty to back his transatlantic voyages, he mentioned God 26 times but gold 114. That’s a line I like so much I’m not even going to dig into whether it’s true.
Then again, failure to enact due diligence was what brought the Bre-X tale to a messy conclusion. Gold isn’t a swindle on par with that debacle, but there’s less going on in the movie than promised in the trailers.
Cinema-going is itself a kind of prospecting, and something you have to be satisfied with a few nuggets amid a lot of mud.