Dumb Money (2023)
Directed by Craig Gillespie
Vlogger Keith Gill sinks his life savings into GameStop stock and posts about it. When social media starts blowing up, so do his life and the lives of everyone following him. As a stock tip becomes a movement, everyone gets rich—until the billionaires fight back, and both sides find their worlds turned upside down.
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What critics compared Dumb Money to
It will be compared to Adam McKay's “The Big Short,” but it's less of a direct lesson in the evils of capitalism, which is to its benefit.
Gillespie’s direction can’t help but remind of Adam McKay’s approach to the stock market in The Big Short, mixed with little touches of The Social Network (the first time we see Keith sit down at his YouTube setup in his basement, it reminds of Mark Zuckerberg getting in the zone, right down to Will Bates’ thematically similar score), but it’s the fragmentation of this story into different perspectives that makes it stand out.
My fear was that Dumb Money would resemble a dramatized Wikipedia page, explaining the technical details of a news story that viewers can just Google themselves. That’s a subgenre popularized by hits like Adam McKay’s The Big Short, a retelling of the 2008 financial crisis that contained repeated jokey scenes of celebrities explaining economics jargon straight to camera, in case viewers couldn’t keep track.
Dumb Money’s exaggerated attitude toward this story is of the “Can you believe this happened?” variety that’s become de rigueur since the success of Adam McKay’s The Big Short.
In a similar style to Adam McKay’s satirical credit crisis flick The Big Short, the technicalities are made digestible thanks to a smart but accessible script from screenwriting duo Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo.
Most people’s stock market knowledge comes from what they read on their 401K statements and then they’re checked out, which means Dumb Money has the same issues that director Adam McKay faced with The Big Short (2015). That film had to explain to audiences how the 2007-2008 financial crisis caused the housing market bubble to burst, using a bunch of investor characters who needed to unpack it while not leaving us in immediate comas.
…a more, shall we say, accessible movie (and one that truly gives a big “fuck you” to power) that captured the essence of that time period is Dumb Money.
Be it his reputation-restoration projects I, Tonya and Pam & Tommy or his live-action Disney origin story Cruella, Craig Gillespie has a thing for making shallow, strident, in-your-face comedic dramas about brash outsiders.
Director Craig Gillespie’s work – I, Tonya, Lars and the Real Girl, and, sure, even Cruella – has largely remained honest about its subjects, yet refreshingly free of judgement. Dumb Money is no different.
Yet what’s most compelling about “Dumb Money” is that Gillespie (the irreverent craftsman of “I, Tonya” and “Cruella”)…
Craig Gillespie, director of I, Tonya and Cruella, helms a serviceable film that expertly recounts a modern-day miracle.
He's also an example in Cruella and I, Tonya director Craig Gillespie's entertaining feature of one of the ideas that this true tale heartily disproves.
Gillespie, a director who loves any mouse that roars (“I, Tonya,” “Cruella”), stands firmly behind Kitty and his workaday followers while relishing the billion-dollar beating that smart-money types like Plotkin took.