(USA, 98
min.)
Dir. Jodie
Foster, Writ. Jamie Linden, Alan DiFiore, Jim Kouf
Starring: George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Jack O’Connell
Gandhi's famous line says that an eye for an eye makes the whole
would blind. Money Monster, however,
argues the opposite theory. If a party in power does the little guy wrong, pop
him in the pupil to give him some perspective.
This new work from director Jodie foster offers an Occupy-era mortality play that's part Dog Day Afternoon and part Network. George Clooney stars as Lee Gates, who hosts an obnoxiously sleazy TV show called Money Monster that offers financial tips in a frat house cabaret where entertainment is king and good journalism plays the fool. His whip-smart director is Patty Fenn (Julia Roberts). Patty, a pro, knows Lee’s show even better than he does and she lends Money Monster some dignity from the control room by anticipating her host’s zany moves.
What Patty doesn’t anticipate, though, is for a mad prophet
of the airwaves to hijack her show.
Enter Kyle (Jack O’Connell) from stage right, who’s ready to play Howard
Beale meets Al Pacino after being ramped up watching back-to-back Sidney Lumet
movies. Kyle is mad as hell after losing all his cash in a faulty investment
with the corporation IBIS, the collapse of which Lee performs in Money Monster’s opening segment. The
fall of IBIS, which humorously has a trading abbreviation of ‘IBS’ to note the
stock market’s volatility akin to explosive diarrhea, attributes itself to a glitch
in the algorithm controlling the trades. It’s an obvious line of PR spin as
Lee, Kyle, and everyone sees through it, but Money Monster smartly introduces the nature of cyber capitalism
that removes humans from the equation and puts America in the sloppy state it’s
in today.
Kyle puts Money
Monster in an on-air hostage crisis when he storms the set with a gun and
straps Lee into a vest of explosives. He wants explanations from everyone: Lee,
the financial guru he trusted; Diane Lester (Catriona Balfe), the IBIS spin
doctor feeding lines to Lee; and Walt Camby (Dominic West), the IBIS CEO who
needs to answer for his company’s mistake.
Money Monster uses
Kyle’s disillusionment with the system and his victimisation by corporate greed
to give voice to the 99 percent and the countless Americans who lost their
livelihoods in the nation’s economic meltdown. The script hammers its
anti-establishment angst far too pointedly—and it’s almost inevitable that any
film that gives a central character a gun, a soapbox, and 90-minutes to vent
his rage will be fairly on-the-nose. Nothing in Kyle’s frustration is a new
revelation—faceless corporate American screws investors out of their
hard-earned salaries—but Money Monster
taps into the simmering frustration and widening economic divides in America
with its fast-paced chamber drama.
The film works far better as a commentary on the decline of
good journalism in the age of click bait and trending topics. Kyle’s hostage
situation obviously becomes the story of the moment as TV screens around the
world tune to the Money Monster
broadcast, which keeps rolling throughout the ordeal on Kyle’s demand, and the
drama shows how a global audience, a collective voice, can unite to hold the
one percent accountable for the imbalance it creates. As Patty gains control of
the situation and directs Lee from the control room, the Money Monster team remembers how to be good reporters. They use the
opportunity to ask the hard questions and follow the clues to push IBIS for
answers—and, in turn, bide time to save Lee’s life.
While the hostage scenario of Money Monster sees mixed results, the newsroom quest for
substantial reporting often provides thrilling drama. Clooney and Roberts, as
always, have great chemistry together. They build a fun, convincing camaraderie
of two vastly dissimilar colleagues whose Yin and Yang relationship better
serves the show. Lee stands in for the one percent with his nice suit and
evasive relationship with accountability, while the modest, no frills, and
hard-working Patty brings the conscious of the American public. The personable pair
of Clooney and Roberts, who create remarkable synergy despite rarely occupying the
same space in the film, harkens back to a recently forgotten era of news media that
emphasised depth of coverage and human interest—a point that Money Monster underscores with its
frequent snippets of Lee’s incessantly annoying show. As the Money Monster team follows the trail to
the top of the IBIS ladder, there’s something here in Foster’s drama that could
have let Money Monster be the Spotlight of newsroom drama.
Money Monster
never entirely works, though, because Lee and Patty are only two points in the
film’s central triangle. Kyle often brings the film down, rather than gives it
gravitas, since O’Connell doesn’t make the triggerman a compelling or
sympathetic force. Lee certainly has a stain of blame on his character as Kyle
catches the guru’s complacency and complicity with the machine of big business,
but Kyle’s never in the right, either, as he uses violence and coercion to get
results. O’Connell, impressive in Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken, is wildly outmatched here as the star power and screen presence
of Clooney and Roberts make the television angle of Money Monster far superior to Kyle’s lament for America’s broken
dream. Whatever Money Monster lacks, Team Clooney and Roberts hits on the money.
Foster mounts her largest production yet as she assembles a
slick and fast-paced drama with admirable convictions. Money Monster unravels in its final act as the climax strains
credibility, but the director gets every cent of her stars’ talent as Clooney
and Roberts command the show, while fluid cinematography by Matthew Libatique
energetically captures the behind-the-scenes frenzy of live TV. However, Money Monster also seems wildly
disconnected with the era it interrogates. A film about the scope and reach of
live TV might be better suited to a 9/11 parable, but, 15 years later, network
television doesn’t hold the same power. Money
Monster barely references the extent to which social media and digital
platforms drive news and information nowadays: there’s nary a Tweet or a
YouTube video throughout the hostage crisis, aside from a sidebar during a
snippet of The Young Turks, although
a series of memes in the finale redeems the omission.
Foster, however, ends the film by noting that audiences
simply don’t have the attention spans that they used to hold. Perhaps as one
story starts trending over another, Money
Monster puts all of us on the hook for being too apathetic and distracted
to ask the same questions that Lee and Patty had also abandoned.
Money Monster is now playing in wide release.
