Dumb Money doesn’t go ‘to the moon’
If I had a nickel for every time in the last five years that Paul Dano played a forum user who, through charisma and intelligence, appeals to a wide base of dedicated nerds to take action against the oppressive systems of billionaires, I would have two nickels. Now, I don’t know what that says about Hollywood or about Paul Dano, but I think it’s clear than that he’s a generational talent when it comes to playing guys who are just a little bit weird.
Based on Ben Mezrich’s 2021 book The Antisocial Network and produced, ironically, by the Winklevoss twins, Dumb Money bounces back and forth between the underdogs (Paul Dano, America Ferrera, Pete Davidson, Anthony Ramos) and the billionaires (Seth Rogen, Sebastian Stan, Vincent D’Onofrio, Nick Offerman) in an effort to explain and dramatize the events surrounding the 2021 GameStop short squeeze, ultimately leading to the failure of investment firm Melvin Capital. Dano leads as Keith Gill, a YouTuber and popular Reddit user credited with inspiring the short squeeze. As the squeeze gains momentum, Gill has to balance his family responsibilities with his newfound obligations as a digital folk hero. Dano plays this mild-mannered family man as a very subdued sort of hacker/revolutionary, never really bursting into the sort of passion or instability for which he’s known as an actor.
Aside from Paul Dano, though, the film does have a handful of tricks up its sleeve. There are several clever montages done in an effort to capture the Reddit zeitgeist which spawned the short squeeze, and the narrative presence of the COVID-19 pandemic is simultaneously unobtrusive and well-utilized.
That said, it’s the extent to which the cast is just plain likeable that most makes this movie worth watching. Seth Rogen is a very pathetic sort of villain, Dano is simple and decent, and Shailene Woodley spends most of two hours looking like she could really use a drink. Ramos and Ferrera both bring the necessary sympathetic charm, and everyone on the billionaire side of the fence is just as stale and haughty as you’d expect people of that tax bracket to be. The script is perfectly functional, and the editing has its moments, but it’s the cast of consummate professionals that really give this film its legs.
That being said, compared to other big films in this genre, this movie really falls short. Held up next to The Wolf of Wall Street or, most obviously, The Big Short, Dumb Money never really manages a distinct style or an authoritative voice. In The Wolf of Wall Street, DiCaprio had the charisma and script necessary to make you feel the sense of enthusiastic greed and hilarious hedonism which possessed the brokers of the time, and The Big Short had the incredible wit and style to make the 2008 crisis understandable as both a narrative and as a financial phenomenon.
Dumb Money, meanwhile, doesn’t have any of that. Remember that scene in The Big Short where they put Margot Robbie in a bathtub and had her explain subprime mortgages? Sure, it was a base appeal to get audience attention, but it’s clever and it’s funny and at the end of the day, it works. Where The Big Short was carried by tricks like that, and The Wolf of Wall Street was carried by, well, Margot Robbie doing different stuff, Dumb Money relies almost entirely on a couple of very flat scenes to deliver the brazen exposition needed to get what’s happening. It lacks the style and confidence to communicate the intricacies of a nebulous financial event, and without that communication, the whole film is a pretty two-dimensional underdog story that just happens to be about the stock market.
So if you go into this film expected The Big Short, or The Wolf of Wall Street, or an Oscar nomination in any category, you will find great disappointment in the many scenes of Paul Dano just running around a track. If, however, you go into it for a pretty good time, a celebration of the Redditors who brought down Melvin Capital, or for an abiding love of Pete Davidson, I’d say you’ll be pretty well satisfied.
“Paul Dano” by dtstuff9 is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.