- Release Date: 06/10/2023
- Cast: Paul Dano, Pete Davidson, Vincent D’Onofrio, Seth Rogen, Nick Offerman, Sebastian Stan, Shailene Woodley
- Director: Craig Gillespie
The Rise and Revolt of the Individual Investor: “Dumb Money” and the GameStop Revolution
ColdFusion is one of the best and most entertainingly educative channels on YouTube currently. A few years back, they uploaded a video titled “Reddit vs Wallstreet – GameStop, The Movie” that immediately struck a chord with me. I found myself watching this video over and over again as I either munched on homemade khichdi and papad during the rainy summer days or had my fill of some sumptuous biryani during my late-night visits to the nearby “The Kitchen” restaurant.
As I enjoyed my food, this was almost always the video that I watched. What was great about this video was not just the classic David Vs Goliath story that it chronicled but also how beautifully ColdFusion simplified an overwhelmingly complicated and complex financial takedown of major hedge funds by individuals into easily intelligible and inspiring content that could be enjoyed almost at a similar level as films like “Margin Call” and “The Big Short”. Years later, I realized that there was a film made about the same story while watching the trailer for “Dumb Money” during the screening of a different Hollywood film.
I asked myself what more could be told about the story that ColdFusion hadn’t already addressed in his greatly elaborate and informative video. It was this question that made me go for this film more than anything else.
“Dumb Money” is how major investment banks address individual or retail investors when they interact among themselves. They feel that they know everything that there is to know about investing and that individual investors almost always lose money because they can never possibly have the amount of information that larger investment organizations have. This is true to a certain extent but not entirely. The incredible true story that “Dumb Money” is based on is one of the most glorious examples of this very fact.
An individual investor, Keith Gill (Paul Dano), discovers and puts his life savings of $53,000 on a stock that the hedge funds had believed would fail since 2014. They were doing something to the stock that is known as shorting in technical terms but in simple language means betting on it to fail. As Gill recognized this stock, put his money on it, and tried to drive public opinion about it using YouTube as a platform. Soon, others like him realized the value of the stock and started investing in it, driving up its price and resulting in the Hedge-Funds losing billions.
This stock was GameStop, and before anyone could know, this business maneuvering between Hedge-Funds and dumb money had catapulted into an all-out war between individual investors and larger corporations. This quickly turned into a popular movement that, for once, saw the common man bring down major corporations to their knees, which, by the way, makes for an extremely enjoyable and inspiring cinematic experience.
The ColdFusion video I keep referring to left very little to be explained about the actual chain of events or how it all culminated. What the film could do that the video could not was to explain the backgrounds and the personalities of the people who were involved in the conflict and how it must have felt for them to be in that particular situation. This is where the film scores some brownie points as Craig Gillespie does exactly this. While doing that, he fails here and there to get into the technicalities of the matter and explain it better for the ones who might not have seen the ColdFusion video, but he keeps his characters and the situations interesting enough to keep the audiences intrigued for the duration of the runtime of the film. Whether it is the protagonist, Keith Gill, or some of the key investors who make significant money from the stock or the larger Hedge-Funds guys, Gillespie takes a long and hard look at their respective lives in the given situation and by doing that, gives us perspectives on their lives and belief systems that the ColdFusion video could not have given.
We see these people talk about personal issues. We see some of them in dire need of money. On the other hand, we also see the arrogance and the extravagance of the Hedge-Funds guys that not only makes us wish to see them fail and suffer but also enhances the fun of seeing them suffer at the end of the film. However, it is another story that the Wall Street guys made enough money out of the predicament that the director chose to ignore but ColdFusion had addressed in his video. I thoroughly enjoyed the minor details about the lives of the people involved in the story that the film is able to address. There is a lot of drama in these moments, and they amplify the need of these people to succeed along with the GameStop stock, which further enhances the intrigue and the thrill involved in the story. I knew how the story was going to culminate, and yet the film’s screenplay got to me and kept me hooked. The comedy too is extremely well done and never overstays its welcome. This is at heart a bizarre but serious story, and the director was smart enough to understand that. He keeps his treatment of the story in line with that very feeling.
One aspect that the film gets into a lot of detail in is the nexus between the app through which most of the individual investors were buying the GameStop stock and how owners of this app were forced, threatened, and coerced in certain ways by the big companies to put a stop to buying the stock and allow only selling. There was an entire congress hearing that went into the whole episode, and these hearings are used as the culmination of the story effectively as they not only give the characters a chance to speak their minds about what they had achieved but also wonderfully underline and expose the scam that the hedge funds were running and how for the first time, they were outsmarted in their own game.
While the first half of the film concentrates on the emotional and personal background of some of the key characters of the film, the second half gets a little more into the nitty-gritty of the situation that was fired up by Keith Gill but also never loses focus on the human aspects of the conflict and the impact of the situations on the people involved from both sides of the conflict.
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Paul Dano, Vincent D’Onofrio, Seth Rogen, Nick Offerman, Sebastian Stan, Shailene Woodley, and a host of other fine actors turn in wonderful performances to make this tale extremely personal and fill the story up with a sense of urgency without which it would be one that would be lost in translation. I would have liked for the film to get a little more into the research of the stock by Keith Gill and explain how he stumbled upon the stock and why he believed it was so good and important, but then I wasn’t too disappointed with what I got from the film in the end.
This felt like the best film for someone like Aaron Sorkin or David Fincher to write and direct, and trust me, in the hands of those two, this would have become another “The Social Network” or “Molly’s Game”. Unfortunately, that is not the case, and now that the film has been made, there is no chance for these two geniuses to pick this story up again. A film of this nature could have done great with the verbose yet lucid nature of the approach to dialogues and showing mundane, research, and computer things in the most interesting manner possible that Fincher and Sorkin have shown a flair for in previous films of theirs. Having said that, “Dumb Money” is still a decent watch even though it could have been better.
Rating: 3/5 (3 out of 5 Stars)
The views expressed in this article are that of the reviewer and do not reflect EastMojo’s position.
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