Cashing in on a popular quest for payback
Money Monster (out of 4) Starring George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Jack O’Connell, Dominic West and Caitriona Balfe. Directed by Jodie Foster. Opens May 13 at GTA theatres. 98 minutes.
Jodie Foster’s Wall Street hostage drama Money Monster is more wishfulfilment fantasy than cogent social commentary.
But it gets one thing exactly right: The desire of many people to see somebody, preferably a wealthy and arrogant loudmouth, pay for the misery brought to millions by cowboy capitalists and their global misadventures.
George Clooney’s obnoxious TV stock guru Lee Gates is the perfect scapegoat, or at least appears to be to agitated viewer Kyle Budwell (Jack O’Connell).
Blue-collar Budwell spent money he didn’t have on the “can’t-miss stock tip of the millennium” touted by Gates’ Money Monster show. The stock missed in spectacular fashion, but cynical Gates shrugged it off as a hard lesson for suckers.
Budwell lost his shirt; now Gates wears an explosive one. Budwell holds the detonator with a fidgety thumb, demanding both redress and a broadcast audience to vent his rage.
Watching pensively from the control room, trying to figure out what to do next, is Julia Roberts’ Patty Fenn, Gates’ longtime show producer and exasperated friend.
She considers Gates an “emotionally stunted 7-year-old” but doesn’t want him to die for his childish and sexist antics.
The stage is set for another of Foster’s cinema epiphanies, which she’s been making in an increasingly grander scale since her intimate directorial debut Little Man Tate in 1991.
Speeches will be made and lessons will be learned, especially when the action expands to include the clandestine manoeuvrings of a tycoon (Dominic West) whose Gates-recommended stock mysteriously crashed, taking Budwell and other foolish dreamers down with it.
Money Monster is professional Hollywood product, with the actors and cinematographer Matthew Libatique ( Black Swan, Noah) hitting their marks without challenging the brain or eye.
You don’t need or get the amusing onscreen explanations of stock jargon that Adam McKay shrewdly provided for The Big Short, a financial hostage-taking of the metaphorical kind.
Yet Money Monster is the more intuitive of the two pictures, more in tune with the little guy.
It recognizes the inchoate anger of people who suddenly realize they’ve been duped by a fast-talking hustler who promised gold but delivered dirt.
If this sounds like a coded reference to a certain U.S. presidential candidate, Foster will be happy if you make that connection, too.