Dumb Money invests a lot into heart, wins big

The pandemic era led to a lot of strange trends in society – the rise of banana bread, Zoom table quizzes, pretending Tiger King was actually good – but there is perhaps no stranger story from that time period than a group of Reddit users taking on Wall Street and winning.

Dumb Money tells the story of Keith Gill, a financial analyst who leads a revolution from his basement in the suburbs of Boston.

Gill, played by Paul Dano in a wonderful performance, builds a loyal following online giving advice on investing in Wall Street stocks, and inadvertently triggers a movement that has the hyper-rich shaking in their boots.

Director Craig Gillespie has form in taking quirky, real-life stories like the Tonya Harding incident and turning it into immensely watchable fare, and Gillespie manages to show the very human side of this bizarre chapter in recent history.

The real-life events of Dumb Money took place in late 2020 and early 2021, and saw ordinary, everyday people buying stock in GameStop, regarded as a “dump stock” by Wall Street bigwigs, and looked to drive up the value of the stock in the process.

Dumb Money very easily could have fallen down the glib Adam McKay trap of using flashy celebrity cameos or glitzy graphics to communicate complex information, but the masterstroke of Dumb Money is showing how the movement was made up from people from all walks of life who wanted a slice of the action.

The film regularly cuts between the perspectives of people caught up in the story, from Gill in his basement, two college students in Texas looking to solve their student debt issues, a frontline worker using the scheme as an escape from the pandemic and a young man working in a tedious retail job looking to strike it rich.

The legendary Billy Wilder once said “An audience is never wrong. An individual member of it may be an imbecile, but a thousand imbeciles together in the dark – that is critical genius,” and that quote may well serve as Dumb Money’s mantra.

Gillespie is hardly a subtle director, and he manages to bring his usual eccentric and high-octane visual panache to this story, but by choosing to mostly focus on the quieter, character-driven moments in the middle of the crazy story he is telling the film is all the better for it.

These characters are brought to life by a brilliant ensemble of actors, with Paul Dano deserving all of the praise for his performance.

Dano looks unlike any other actor, and his greatest quality as an actor is the virtue that he happens to look like someone who works as a financial analyst and uses Reddit in their spare time.

Dano’s performance is incredibly naturalistic, funny when it needs to be, serious when the script calls for it, and he makes it all look effortless.

Pete Davidson, who has had a hit-and-miss film career, manages to steal the show as Dano’s brother, and surprisingly becomes the heart of the film as well as the audience favourite.

Great actors like America Ferrera, Shailene Woodley, Clancy Brown and Anthony Ramos help flesh out the underdog cast, and the “bad guys” as it were are equally well cast.

Seth Rogen, Vincent D’Onofrio and Nick Offerman do a great job playing the money men on the other end of the equation, with Rogen continuing to show that he is a tremendous dramatic actor when he is given the right material to work with.

Despite having a runtime just short of 100 minutes, Dumb Money manages to pack a lot in and juggle several different character dynamics, which is a testament to the screenplay by Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo.

Dumb Money is the pair’s first produced screenplay, having previously worked on Orange Is The New Black, and the pair appear to have a knack for mixing the silly and the serious.

Two of the most unheralded screenwriters of our time are Scott Alexander and Larry  Karaszewski, responsible for the likes of Ed Wood, The People versus Larry Flynt and My Name Is Dolemite, and the pair are the godfathers of the post-modern biopic.

The spirit and energy of Alexander and Karaszewski are all over Dumb Money, and it turns out that Craig Gillespie can turn in a relatively subdued and humanistic film if he is given the right script to work with and puts trust in the writers.

One of the great tricks a film based on a true story can pull is creating tension even if you know how it already ends, and on those merits, Dumb Money does a fantastic job of getting you hooked into the story if you’ve never heard of the story before while serving as a fun trip down memory lane if you followed the story closely during the pandemic.

Dumb Money may well be a film that strikes a chord with audiences, with its timely examination of economic hardship and normal people looking for a refuge from the stresses of the world coming at a time when these topics are on people’s minds, and just like how The Social Network managed to capture recession-era hopes and fears back in 2010, Dumb Money has pulled the same trick for the TikTok generation.