Gold (2016)
Directed by Stephen Gaghan
Kenny Wells, a modern-day prospector, hustler, and dreamer, is desperate for a lucky break. Left with few options, Wells teams up with an equally luckless geologist to execute a grandiose, last-ditch effort: to find gold deep in the uncharted jungle of Indonesia.
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4 films that influenced Gold
What critics say influenced Gold
Gold plays like a metallurgical spin on The Big Short, spelling out mining concepts to anyone so amused.
The combination of financial derring-do and the myth of the self-made American millionaire is in the spirit of recent films like The Big Short and The Wolf of Wall Street.
And there are flickering reminders of other ambitious, money-chasing mock epics, as if the filmmakers were hoping an algorithm would deposit “Gold” in the queues of viewers who liked “American Hustle,” “The Big Short” and Mr. Gaghan’s own “Syriana.”
Most directly descended from The Wolf of Wall Street , with thematic echoes of American Hustle and a dash of the capitalism-run-amok of The Big Short thrown in for good measure, Gold falters not only due to the oversaturation of its premise but also from heavy-handed pacing, dull characters and adherence to tropes over dramatic depth—problems which can’t be disguised by slapping a bald cap and some crooked teeth on a slightly pot-bellied Matthew McConaughey.
The narrative combines avarice, naiveté, corporate throat-slitting, and betrayal in ways that claim thematic kinship with The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and (more recently) The Wolf of Wall Street and The Big Short .
Loosely inspired by real events, Stephen Gaghan’s ( Syriana ) satirical drama Gold plays like some sort of bug-eyed, whiskey-swilling love child of The Wolf of Wall Street and The Big Short .
Members of the production have compared it to Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, to David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross , and to a couple of John Huston classics: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Man Who Would Be King .
Gaghan’s functional direction always seems just short of a perceived “American Hustle” meets “Glengarry Glen Ross” goal: peppy but never exhilarating about its office scenes, honest about the harshness of its jungle sequence but hardly evocative, and regarding McConaughey’s natural showiness, less an ally than an enabler.
With reverberations of no less than The Treasure of Sierra Madre , Death of a Salesman and even Glengarry Glen Ross , the story has McConaughey at the center as the ever-energetic Kenny Wells, toiling for his dad’s respectable mining company in Reno.
The film hangs on McConaughey's charisma like an old, yellowing suit, but is a reasonably enjoyable blend of Martin Scorsese's wild "The Wolf of Wall Street" and Werner Herzog's "Fitzcarraldo," even down to the record player spinning in the middle of a remote jungle.
Directed by Stephen Gaghan (Syriana), Gold cannot help but be compared to Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, a film that more successfully sought Oscar “gold” by looking at the precipitous rise and fall of a businessman and related stock values.
The combination of financial derring-do and the myth of the self-made American millionaire is in the spirit of recent films like The Big Short and The Wolf of Wall Street.
Most directly descended from The Wolf of Wall Street , with thematic echoes of American Hustle and a dash of the capitalism-run-amok of The Big Short thrown in for good measure, Gold falters not only due to the oversaturation of its premise but also from heavy-handed pacing, dull characters and adherence to tropes over dramatic depth—problems which can’t be disguised by slapping a bald cap and some crooked teeth on a slightly pot-bellied Matthew McConaughey.
I'm not sure why a similarly greedy, insistent, often repugnant protagonist didn't completely turn me off in " The Wolf of Wall Street "—maybe Leonardo DiCaprio is a better match for his character than McConaughey, a " Wolf " bit player, is for Kenny, or maybe Scorsese is just a more imaginative and varied director than Gaghan.
The narrative combines avarice, naiveté, corporate throat-slitting, and betrayal in ways that claim thematic kinship with The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and (more recently) The Wolf of Wall Street and The Big Short .
Kenny’s hubris — he persists in his belief that the next big find is out there, even after his family prospecting firm is about to go under, and he’s running the business from a bar — is a prominent theme of the film, which was directed by Academy Award-winning “Traffic” screenwriter Stephen Gaghan, from a screenplay by “Friday Night Lights” writers Patrick Massett and John Zinman.
Crisply written by Friday Night Lights screenwriters Patrick Massett and John Zinman, Gold is based on a real-life 1990s stock-market swindle emanating from Calgary, Canada, which the filmmakers have rerouted to a sexier, more tawdry Reno, Nevada.
Though the ‘actual events’ in question (Canada’s Bre-X mining scandal) took place in the 90s, the film, written by Patrick Massett and John Zinman (known for their work on TV series including The Blacklist and Friday Night Lights ), shifts the action to the more go-go 80s.
Writers Patrick Massett and John Zinman (TV’s Friday Night Lights) likely pitched it as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre meets The Wolf of Wall Street.