It’s Everyday Investors vs. Hedge Funds in the Battle for GameStop’s Soul
DIRECTOR: CRAIG GILLESPIE/2023
Here are my two takeaways from Dumb Money:
- Money is, well, dumb.
- We have not figured out how to make movies about the Internet yet.
Re: my first takeaway: I do not understand the stock market. I understand the concept of the stock market, but I do not understand its mechanics. I once heard someone argue submarine warfare is unnecessary because no one lives underwater; therefore we only have submarine warfare because a few people decided to build underwater boats with missiles, thus creating a Pandora’s box-style problem for the whole world. In the same way I do not understand how or why anyone got in a room to make up a convoluted system for spending money so stochastic one person can make $5 million in one day while another can lose $1 billion. Humanity survived for thousands of years without submarines or stock markets, and living without them probably prolonged more people’s lives than living with them has.
The writers of and characters in Dumb Money may not share my confusion completely, but they at least agree the market is not designed for people without MBAs. If you saw the headlines about GameStop’s share prices’ unusual gains in the last few years but don’t know how it began, the answer is Keith Gill (Paul Dano). His online persona, Roaring Kitty, provides fellow Reddit users on /wallstreetbets with semi-amateur investment analysis, and in late 2020, he believes experts are underestimating the value of GameStop. He begins buying, and his fans follow suit, including a nurse fighting the pandemic (America Ferrera), college students with loans (Myha’la, Talia Ryder), and an hourly GameStop employee (Anthony Ramos). Hedge fund CEOs (Seth Rogen, Vincent D’Onofrio, and Nick Offerman, in the style of Ron Swanson in the clutches of Tammy One) don’t believe Keith and his cohort—whom they refer to as “dumb money”—have a shot at thwarting their thoughtless plan to short the stock, but soon the ticker symbol GME is in the news. Everyone—including retail traders, billionaire investors, clueless Robinhood app founders (Sebastian Stan, Rushi Kota), and Congress—are in for a surprise.
Re: my second takeaway, Dumb Money feels like scrolling through the Internet: always entertaining, needlessly profane, and featuring TikTok dances though I’m not looking for them. (Also, it’s produced by the Winklevoss twins? Yes, this film is based off a book called The Antisocial Network.) And like the Internet, I’m of two minds about Dumb Money. I laughed a lot (even the hit-or-miss Pete Davidson works), but it’s also reduced every person to either heartless villain or underdog hero. I’m impressed a movie could tell a recent story so easy to follow, but I wondered several times during its runtime if a well-researched New Yorker article (which my Pocket app would tell me would take 31 minutes to read) would help me understand these financial concepts better than a story with the attention span of a Twitter thread. As I lamented when writing about Asteroid City, the Internet is not cinematic, and when Dumb Money montages its way through YouTube comments and self-facing camera rants, it feels like watching a slideshow of vertical images moving with the animation I used in a PowerPoint presentation in 9th grade English class. I know I’m more invested in the look of a film than the average moviegoer, but no one goes to the theater to see segments that look like they were created in iMovie.
Perhaps that lack of cinematic subject matter is why Dumb Money borrows so much from another film: 2015’s The Big Short. Both feature stacked ensembles investigating the future of the economy thanks to one guy able to read between the gridlines of a spreadsheet, and Dumb Money follows that Best Picture nominee’s Oscar-winning script template down to its pacing and copies its poster. Most great movies ape great ones that have come before it, but this one doesn’t bring anything new to the conversation about Wall Street, exploring the same ideas with less nuance. In The Big Short, it’s not clear if our protagonists are heroes, opportunists, or something else entirely, but we never question Keith’s integrity because Shailene Woodley plays a Supportive Wife™ who never questions him either. (Woodley and fellow supporting player Dane DeHaan need to be in more movies, but this doesn’t do either of them much service.) Dumb Money sells itself as a David and Goliath tale, but few stories are as black-and-white as the text on the screens inside the New York Stock Exchange.