The saga of the GameStop short squeeze, in which an army of low-level retail investors, following the counter-intuitive lead of Keith Gill, a former financial analyst offering his thoughts on the stock market via a YouTube channel broadcasting from his basement, began buying stock in the financially beleaguered video game retailer in such droves that they drove the once-flatlining price up to record highs while threatening the hedge funds that had bet heavily on its failure with the loss of billions, captured the attention of many people, even those with no working knowledge of investing, as it unfurled in 2020-21. Having already been chronicled in the fascinating Ben Mezrich book The Anti-Social Network and the tepid Netflix documentary series Eat the Rich, the story has now been given the big screen treatment in Dumb Money, an occasionally interesting but often uneven take on the story that is more glib than incisive and which is never quite as smart or daring as it thinks it is.
In recounting the often-bizarre story, director Craig Gillespie and screenwriters Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo have elected to cast it as a simple David vs. Goliath narrative in which ordinary people go up against the seemingly all-powerful system and triumph—at least for a little while. On the David side is Gill (Paul Dano), an ordinary guy who seems to genuinely believe in the possibilities of GameStop and has just enough knowledge of the market to lend credence to those beliefs, especially when he sinks virtually all of the savings into it, with the backing of his always-supportive wife (a wasted Shailene Woodley). On the other side of the coin are hedge fund owners and venture capitalists like Gabe Plotkin (Seth Rogen), Steve Cohen (Vincent D’Onofrio) and Ken Griffen (Nick Offerman)—whose initially dismissive attitude towards the swarm of so-called “dumb money” investors seemingly throwing their money away on a stock they have deemed worthless change quickly when they stand to lose billions of dollars as GameStop’s price continues to grow—and Vlad Tenev (Sebastian Shaw), the CEO of stock-trading app RobinHood (the one favored by most GameStop investors) whose controversial actions, supposedly at the behest of the hedge funds he was in business with, added an extra level of scandal to the proceedings and landed all the key players before a congressional committee trying to get to the bottom of what happened.
Much of this is interesting, I suppose (I know I followed the story as it unfolded despite having neither dabbled in the market nor set foot in a GameStop), but the key problem faced by anyone trying to turn it into a narrative film is the undeniable fact that while the influx of retail investors did cause an undeniable shock to a few of the short sellers in this particular case, the events did not have any long-lasting effect on the financial system as a whole. The film tries to work around that by focusing on a few individual investors—including an overworked nurse (America Ferrara), a pair of college students (Talia Ryder and Myah’la) already swimming in debt and an actual low-level GameStop employee (Marcus Ramos)—who are inspired by Gill’s low-key fervor to risk their own meager funds and stick with him even when common sense dictates that they should sell while they can. Alas, these vignettes are more successful at manipulating the emotions of viewers than in giving a fuller picture of the story and the mindset of those caught up in it. Meanwhile, the fat cats are depicted with all the subtlety of a subpar SNL skit—Shaw is literally made up to resemble a vampire, D’Onofrio is often seen in the company of a pet pig while Rogen comes across as such a doofus that it is impossible to imagine anyone entrusting him with the money required to buy a pack of gum, let alone billions of dollars.
Dumb Money has a few amusing moments here and there and the alternately slick and sentimental approach to the material will no doubt find favor with those who did not follow the story when it happened. Though it does have some undeniable charms (including a good performance by Dano as Gill) and moves at a decent clip without getting too bogged down (although things might still be a tad confusing for those going in without much knowledge of the subject at hand), I couldn’t help but come away from it feeling that it should have been a little smarter and more cutting—something along the lines of Barbarians at the Gate, the brutally funny examination of another infamous incident of naked corporate greed gone wildly awry—than the Capraesque crowd-pleaser approach taken here (albeit with far more F-bombs than Capra might have been comfortable with utilizing). Frankly, the funniest and darkest joke in the entire film—the one that really sticks with you afterwards—doesn’t come until the end credits, when it is revealed that this film, one supposedly dedicated to revealing the greedy machinations of venture capitalists, was in fact co-produced by noted venture capitalists Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss (yes, the ones featured in The Social Network), proving once again that the house always wins.