You’re so money

There are a few bullet points in Money Monster, Jodie Foster’s Wall Street drama about a disgruntled investor who decides to take a TV financial guru hostage live on air until he gets answers. Some of the takeaways are that people who are greedy and get in late on a rising stock tend to get burnt quicker (tough luck for them). Also, the word “wrong” doesn’t really have any functional utility for Wall Street sharks (it’s only about what makes them more money). But the lasting takeaway, perhaps, comes close to the final credits: when the hostage crisis is resolved, a bunch of college kids who previously had been riveted to the television drama instantly go back to playing their foosball game. The message: the game continues. Nothing changes.

Money Monster is the kind of nightmare fantasy that will appeal to Bernie Sanders supporters, fans of Mr. Robot and ejected Occupy Wall Streeters. Directed tautly by Foster from a script by Alan Di Fiore, Jim Kouf and Jamie Linden, it tells us some now-familiar truths about the world: that it is largely operated by those with the means to rig the game. Financially, and politically, this results in more for them, less for you. It’s a good mindset to adopt while watching Money Monster, though the drama tosses in a few curveballs as well as more than a few implausibilities along the way.

Lee Gates (George Clooney) is a fatuous TV host on a financial cable network who tells people what stocks to stick their necks out for (when he’s not dancing with showgirls on-camera and wearing funny hats). He gets it spectacularly wrong with a big global capital firm called IBIS, run by Walt Camby (Dominic West), and the stock plummets by $800 million. One of the countless investors directly affected is Kyle Budwell (Jack O’Connell, from Angeline Jolie’s Unbroken), an angry young guy from Queens who loses his entire life savings on the stock.

He blames Gates, and shows up at the studio with a gun and a suicide vest packed with explosives. His finger on the detonator, he demands that Camby account for the losses. Another person who begins to suspect Camby’s not being transparent is Diane Lester, IBIS’s PR person (Caitriona Balfe from TV’s Outlander).

Meanwhile, Gates’ on-air director, Patty Fenn (Julia Roberts), tries to keep her TV host from getting blown up while juggling a trigger-happy police squad, the hostage taker’s irate (and pregnant) girlfriend, and a slippery CEO who blames the IBIS losses on an “algorithm glitch.”

The first implausibility is why Budwell shows up in the studio in the first place. He’s not delusional, but insists it’s the fault of Gates for telling viewers that the IBIS stock was “safer than your saving’s account.” (Nobody put a gun to his head and made him buy the stock.) One suspects the rationale of Money Monster is simply to get a mad-as-hell guy on TV, kind of a mash-up of Network’s loony anchorman Howard Beale and Sonny, Al Pacino’s fledgling bank robber character from Dog Day Afternoon. But comparisons to the superior Sidney Lumet film from the ‘70s only points out how apathetic, blasé and cynical people have become about politics. They would rather go back to their foosball game. Foster tries to capture this mass indifference — a kind of “me first” mentality that pervades the world economy these days — yet the script lacks the punch to really drive the point home. The fact is, the rich are getting way, way, way richer than just about everybody else in the world (fun fact: the world’s 62 richest billionaires own as much wealth as the bottom half of the world’s population) and this is no accident: the rich have learned how to rig the system, rewrite the rules and playbook, and shell-game their wealth into tax-free havens (see the “Panama Papers” for ample evidence of this).

So what are we to do, we regular type people who live and work and occasionally go to see movies for our mass entertainment? Not much, it seems. Money Monster won’t exactly make you rise up out of your seat and storm the financial barricades. Like the cable show it’s named after, Gates’ razzle-dazzle TV showcase of financial advice, Money Monster is ultimately about entertainment, not enlightenment.

There are a few choice observations about how we got to this point of greed and “me first” indifference. But nothing you couldn’t glean from a Bernie Sanders stump speech. People, it seems, are basically scared about losing their jobs and savings and will seek any means to multiply their wealth, such as investing in risky stock or property, even if it means entering into a den of greed that could instantly wipe them out. And there’s an underlying theme of failure here — about how people judge themselves too much by a financial metric in America, and how it leads to deep dissatisfaction. A life guided only by money concerns is an empty existence — Money Monster gets this part right.

What also works in the movie is the easy rapport between Clooney and Roberts (last seen together in Ocean’s 12), and O’Connell’s desperate, yet surprisingly lucid and sympathetic bid to get Gates to atone for his sins. As Gates, Clooney is about as glib and facile as you’d expect; that’s part of his charm, after all. Roberts is cool-headed and earthy, getting the job done, and trying to make her show, Money Monster, into something it rarely ever tries to be: journalism. In a nod to James Brooks’ Broadcast News, she attempts to make lemonade out of lemons, fashioning an actual news broadcast from the hostage crisis (this is another implausibility: asking her cameraman to go in tighter on the hostage-taker because he’s “in shadow” seems a little off-point), and even doing enough investigative work behind the scenes to nail Camby and his money shenanigans. You almost expect them all to high-five one another in the control room for pulling off the broadcast.

But again, this only reinforces the suspicion that Money Monster only wishes us to feel good, believing the financial demons out there will ultimately be caught and punished and all will somehow be made right with the world. But this takeaway is about as delusional as Lee Gates’ “safe as milk” pronouncements on IBIS stock.

There is one telling moment, when Gates tries to turn around the plummeting stock by asking people to pick up their phones and purchase shares to make IBIS profitable enough to earn Budwell’s money back — but more importantly to prevent him from getting blown into bits on live TV. It’s a nice nod to the power of crowdsourcing, but it backfires, of course: not enough people care about the TV host to actually shell out their own hard-earned money, and the stock sinks even lower. These are hard times, after all.