The GameStop short squeeze of 2021, in which a new generation of online-savvy retail traders found a way to massively disrupt and break into an American stock market dominated by large hedge funds, has been recognized as a revolutionary moment for the financial industry. It’s hard to square that, though, with the cinematic treatment it gets in Craig Gillespie’s blithely conventional Dumb Money. For a story about the ability of new technology to upend traditional modes of power, the film itself is a dispiritingly outmoded affair.
The title of the film refers to the derisive moniker that retail traders are given by hedge funds—that is, that they have no real knowledge of or impact on the financial world. Chief among the retail traders involved in the GameStop saga is Brockton, Massachusetts, native Keith Gill (Paul Dano). In the real world, he’s a middle-class financial analyst and devoted family man, but online, he’s a stock market guru, donning his trademark red headband and assortment of illustrated cat T-shirts to make investment advice videos under his handles Roaring Kitty (on Twitter and YouTube) and DeepFuckingValue (on Reddit). After following and championing GameStop for months, Gill inadvertently kicks off a buying spree of the undervalued stock among his followers, leading to serious financial ramifications for the big guys on Wall Street.
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. Accordingly, the corporate Goliaths of the tale are defined by their dumbfounded-ness, as in Seth Rogen doing a buttoned-up riff on his customary goofball routine as Melvin Capital CEO Gabe Plotkin, or gleeful glowering, like Vincent D’Onofrio, as New York Mets owner Steve Cohen, acting all of his scenes alongside his billionaire character’s pet pig. Elsewhere, Sebastian Stan shows up with a funny wig and odd affect as Vlad Tenev, the placidly vampiric CEO of Robinhood, the user-friendly stock-trading app that hosted the majority of the GameStop action.
On the David side of the battle lines, you could set your watch to how reliably Gill’s story adheres to the straightforward chronicle of the rise and fall of the American everyman. As written by Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo, Dumb Money devotes much of its runtime to manufactured emotional beats between Gill and his doting wife, Caroline (Shailene Woodley, in a role that mostly requires her to look on from the sidelines in astonishment or concern), and his pot-smoking burnout brother, Kevin (Pete Davidson, making absolutely no effort to play against type). And the frustrating cost of that focus is that little attention is paid to the dichotomy between Gill’s soft-spoken, family-man persona and his online prankster side.
The online realm in general feels oddly perfunctory across the film, despite it being the central aspect of the GameStop saga. Memes, TikTok videos, and online lingo like “Stonks” and “Tendies” are intermittently strewn across the screen in blandly aestheticized nightly news montages. Meanwhile, hardscrabble retail traders from all over the country are introduced in an attempt to express sappy sentiments about beaten-down people finding online social connection through the GameStop explosion in the face of anxieties brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic. Unfortunately, these characters, like an overworked nurse (American Ferrera) or a couple of ambitious college students (Talia Ryder and Myha’la Herrold), mostly sound like didactic mouthpieces for the filmmakers to get across the tech aspects at play in this saga.
After a while, it becomes difficult to shake that Dumb Money is as clueless about the virtual forces underlying the GameStop boom as the blindsided hedge funds were. During the film’s climax, Gill testifies in front of the House Financial Services Committee about his role in the short squeeze, closing with his signature catchphrase, “I like the stock.” In reality, that declaration had at that point become the memeified rallying cry of the entire GameStop movement, indicative of the absurdly senseless chaos that the online retail trading community was inflicting on the ostensibly no-nonsense logic of the hedge funds. But the viewer never really gets a sense of that from Dumb Money, given how little time it previously spends exploring Gill’s Roaring Kitty persona or even mentioning the ubiquitous phrase in the first place.
Dumb Money’s status as a corporate entertainment product (among the film’s producers is the Winklevoss twins) also presents an internal discord in and of itself, particularly with the script incessantly preaching financial equality for all. The GameStop saga was a pivotal shock to the financial system, but there’s no denying that the hierarchy of the stock market was hardly disrupted after all was said and done, with the most financially affected hedge funds receiving the customary bailouts. Gillespie’s film only dips its toes into this bleak outlook, preferring to zero in on the faintly positive conclusion that a few individual traders came away with some monetary gains from this whole mess. Ultimately, the film only pretends to rail against the scourge of unchecked capitalism, instead neatly packaging the “power to the people” message for the continued financial gains of its own elite commercial infrastructure.
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