DUMB MONEY: A Wild Wall Street Tale

The GameStop short-squeeze of 2021 is dramatized in Dumb Money, but not in a dry or analytical manner. The topic has been thoroughly deciphered through various articles and documentaries since. This film tries to place a human face on the farce and attempt to feel something more than an eyebrow raised as high as the GameStop stock price. Though it’s a messy ordeal, some absurdity and drama is found in this contemporary class struggle picture.

Taking The Bets

The sudden rise in GameStop’s stock was the work of Keith Gill, excellently played by Paul Dano, who once again takes on the role of a nerd too clever for his good. Having obsessed over GameStop’s stock, he knows everything there is to know about this company, and he’s certain his stock purchases will pay off. He streams all his homework to his audience between talking with his wife, Caroline (Shailene Woodley), and feeding his child chicken tenders.

His tactics attract users of the Reddit page r/WallStreetBets. Everyone has a reason for leaping. Jennifer Campbell (America Ferrera) is an overworked nurse and single mother with many bills to pay. Marcus (Anthony Ramos) is a GameStop employee growing tired of his low pay and annoying selling duties. Riri (Myha’la Herrold) and Harmony (Talia Ryder) are college students with loads of debt. They watch the videos, crunch the numbers, and say “screw it” before pushing “Buy” on the Robinhood stock trading app.

The Vulture Elite

On the other side of the coin are the rich who profit from Wall Street’s corrupt games. This includes three hedge fund managers: the mildly calm Kenneth C. Griffin (Nick Offerman), the reassured Steve Cohen (Vincent D’Onofrio), and the nervous Gabe Plotkin (Seth Rogen), who starts sweating bullets when he starts losing money. While Gabe darts between calls and interviews, uncertain about his future, the higher-ups hardly fret. Why would they? They’re rich and have ways to ensure the house always wins.

Also portrayed in the film are the owners of the Robinhood trading app: Vlad Tenev (Sebastian Stan) and Baiju Bhatt (Rushi Kota). They become complicit in the corruption when it’s revealed that their “free” trading app takes secret payments and that they’re trying to get their own stock. So when the short-squeeze presents a problem to their benefactors, they manipulate the system in a highly illegal way.

Mixing Many Stories

There are plenty of characters juggled in this narrative, and it’d be easy for this narrative to get lost in the storm of money, deals, subpoenas, and memes. Thankfully, director Craig Gillespie finds a good balance. He never falls back entirely on the plight of the lower-middle class or the skewering of the upper class, though the sympathies lie with the obvious underdogs. Progressively edited and punctuated with engrossing rap music, the film’s vibe is easy enough to read that it plays affectionately at explaining the ordeal.

From this assembly, there are some characters we don’t explore as much. The hedge fund managers and Robinhood founders have the least screentime despite being played by top stars. The underdog characters also have stories that peter out or fall to the wayside. The good news is that this assembly reflects the nature of the short squeeze: Some people win, some people lose, and others drift off into the ether.

Worth Questioning

While the speedy direction mostly works, there are some areas worth delving into more that Dumb Money doesn’t cover. It’s telling that the film wants to embrace the underdog aspect of investors holding firm on their stocks without questioning the culture cultivated around it. The supporters of this movement occupied Reddit and other social media channels, where they referred to themselves as autists and retards and defined their movement with edgy humor.

The film does bring up these questionable aspects but rarely addresses them. Steve reads one of their forum topics that contains ableist slurs and only briefly remarks, “Can you even say that?” Later, threats and concerning posts in the r/WallStreetBets subreddit are brought up and quickly swept under the rug as being promptly removed from the forum. Then comes the banning of r/WallStreetBets for hateful content, which Caroline immediately downplays as just a few bad apples.

More To The Underdogs

Not much grey shows up in a narrative that seems better built for addressing this aspect, which went woefully ignored by earlier documentaries on this topic. I get that the film wants to make the investors out to be warriors battling with the rich, coordinating an effort to take down hedge fund managers. To the film’s credit, it also accurately showcases the low-brow and cringeworthy online campaign that drove the squeeze. This includes incorporating Elon Musk in the many memes and featuring him interviewing Robinhood’s founders. There’s a surreal aspect to watching Musk being

touted as an ally in scrutinizing the elite, given everything we know about him then and now.

Some of the voices in Dumb Money are at risk of being drowned out by the many players in this ordeal. Yes, hedge fund managers are garbage people, and the fact that they only took a handful of blows is infuriating. But what of the members of the movement who slung around words like “retard” and “autistic” like they were teenage edge-lords? It harms this film that the only critical voice of Keith’s movement is his immature brother, Kevin (Pete Davidson), whose commentary only goes so far as calling everybody involved a nerd. That aspect will be relatable for those who can’t make heads or tails of the stock market, but it’s an underwhelming dose of comic relief for those already up to speed on the event.

Conclusion:

Though rough and messy, Dumb Money makes for an entertaining and relatable recount of the GameStop stock story. The performances are all-around great, the pacing is fast enough never to get lost in the details, and the story is engaging enough to inspire anger at a corrupt system that you almost have to laugh at it all. For being made so soon after the event, it gets the job done of boiling the stock market story down to a small act of defiance against Wall Street’s darker aspects. The class divide highlighted in the film is firm enough to display how volatile our current capitalist structure is, where all it takes is some money and app tinkering to make or break lives in an instant. It’s a small victory worth noting and a story worth telling, even if it was built on the backs of memes that will age like milk.

Dumb Money is currently playing in theaters everywhere.

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