The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Lackluster ‘Gold’ centers on showboat-y performance
The experience of gold is hard to put into words, according to a character in a new film by that name: “The taste of it on your tongue, the feel of it on your fingers — it’s like a drug. It’s electric,” says Mike Acosta (Edgar Ramirez), a geologist who, with his prospecting partner Kenny Wells (Matthew McConaughey), has just announced the discovery of a mother lode of the precious metal in a remote Indonesian jungle.
The experience of “Gold” — the movie — is not quite so ineffable. Loosely based on the real-life exploits of David Walsh, a Calgary businessman who claimed, in the 1990s, to have found a gold mine potentially worth several billion dollars, the film is decidedly unelectric. Despite its apparent aspirations to be something more than a financial story with a twist — an admittedly good one — “Gold” feels, for much of its two hours, less like a great buzz than an overlong profile in Business Insider.
The man at the center of this portrait is Kenny, played by a scenery-chomping McConaughey, with a chrome dome and a frequently flashed beer belly that seem less organic to the character than like window dressing calculated to showcase the actor’s willingness to tone down his good looks, as he did in his Oscar-winning turn as an AIDS patient in “Dallas Buyers Club.” But a performance — even one as showboat-y as this — does not a movie make.
The plot of “Gold” drags inexcusably, irredeemably even, up to and beyond the point at which the story pivots. (Viewers are strongly cautioned against googling Walsh’s story if they aren’t already familiar with it. The twist to this tale of pluck and determination lends the film its only genuine interest, even if it feels like it comes too late and delivers too little.)
Transplanting the setting of Kenny’s company from Canada to Reno, the movie strains to render a satire of the American spirit, overlaid with notes of tragedy. Kenny’s hubris — he persists in his belief that the next big find is out there, even after his family prospecting firm is about to go under, and he’s running the business from a bar — is a prominent theme of the film, which was directed by Academy Award-winning “Traffic” screenwriter Stephen Gaghan, from a screenplay by “Friday Night Lights” writers Patrick Massett and John Zinman.
Unfortunately, “Gold” never rises above a character study, albeit one centered on a Technicolor personality. One scene, featured in the trailer, shows Kenny entering a cage to stroke a pet tiger, simply to curry favor with an Indonesian mining official. It’s a mildly entertaining moment, but feels like it was dreamed up to make the story more interesting.
That’s odd. The source material is rich enough, but Massett and Zinman’s script renders it in a manner that all too often jerks us out of the moment. McConaughey narrates the action as Kenny, with several scenes interrupted by flash-forwards to an interview with an unidentified individual (Timothy Simons of “Veep.”). Once his identity and purpose is revealed late in the film, his presence makes sense, but these scenes add neither context nor suspense, and disrupt the film’s momentum at the most inopportune times, robbing the narrative of power.
The most ironic thing about “Gold” is this: For all its efforts, the movie seems to know it’s sitting on a gold mine of a backstory, but it just can’t figure out how to get the stuff out of the ground.