WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?

Opening this week, hopefully only in the movies...

Civil War--Such a conflict has broken out in the contemporary United States. Fighting seems largely confined, so far, to the northeast, between the government and the "Western Forces," a confederation between Texas and California (!), though there also seem to be guerilla fighters around, and I couldn't always tell which side, if either, they were supposed to support.

We're told that in places like Missouri and Colorado people are still "pretending this isn't happening." But the country between New York and D.C. is lawless and shattered and bloody, with refugee camps and burning buildings and mass graves and bodies hanging in car washes or from overpasses. Canadian cash is needed if you want to buy gas.

The focus of writer-director Alex Garland's gruesome road movie is on four Reuters journalists (Kirsten Dunst, Cailee Spaeny, Wagner Moura and Stephen McKinley Henderson) trying to make their way south down back roads, in a van marked "PRESS," from New York to D.C. They're hoping to interview the three-term President (Nick Offerman) before the capitol falls to the Western Forces.

If some of these alliances sound improbable or confusing to you in the context of our current real-life partisan divide, all I can say is that they did to me, too. Garland seems to quite deliberately make the ideologies behind his clashing forces vague, and both sides are shown to be equally ruthless; no quarter is granted in this combat, no prisoners taken.

The movie grips, evoking a potent sense of a nightmare that many of us fear. But it's also unsatisfying, even maddening. In the movie's best, most terrifyingly believable scene, for instance, our heroes are at the non-mercy of a murderous soldier (Jesse Plemons) who articulates an overtly racist, nationalist vision of America. But again, we aren't sure which side this guy is on, or even if he's officially on either side.

What I hope is that Garland's insistent, evasive non-partisanship isn't the result of commercial timidity; of a wish for the movie to play equally well in Red and Blue markets alike. Even more so, I hope that it isn't a result of sincere ideological false equivalence. Rising above partisanship is a laudable goal, certainly, and few reasonable observers would suggest that decent people on both sides don't have legitimate grievances, even if they're often directed at the wrong targets. But the idea that both sides are somehow morally equal is indefensible.

In the absence of conviction about what's at stake in the outcome of this conflict, Civil War takes shape as an earnest journalism drama. Dunst is effectively haunted as the disillusioned photographer; Spaeny, who looks like she should be home studying for a 9th-grade algebra test, is the newbie who Dunst doesn't think belongs on this treacherous trip. Moura is the febrile, adrenalin-stoked reporter and Henderson is the wise old veteran correspondent. About all we're left to invest in is that old-school newshound standard--will they get the big story?

Unless, of course, another investment is possible. It's hard to shake the question of to what degree this movie may be aimed at that part of the audience that thinks this sort of anarchy would be cool. One sometimes has this sense with the zombie movies--a feeling that part of the appeal is that of shooting people in the head with impunity--and the Mad Max style postapocalyptic actioners.

Intentionally or not, Civil War carries a queasy whiff of this same twisted wishful thinking. But in this case, the fantasy is sickeningly attainable.

DUMBDOG MILLIONAIRE

Opening in Phoenix today; wide on October 6:

Dumb Money--As with 2015's The Big Short, there were plenty of twists and turns in this movie that my finance-challenged brain had to struggle to keep up with. Also like The Big Short, this chronicle of the weird January 2021 boom in GameStop stock is waggish fun. But it's easier to root for the heroes here, because, as least as this movie tells it, they're ordinary people sticking it to rich hedge fund jerks rather than rich hedge fund jerks sticking it to all of us.

GameStop, a Texas-based video game retailer that had been a mall mainstay since the '80s under one name or another, had been in decline since the rise of online game purchasing. The COVID pandemic seemed like the death knell for the company, and hedge fund short sellers were moving in.

Dumb Money's focus is on Keith Gill (Paul Dano), a small-potatoes analyst and broker from Brockton, Massachusetts. Gill had a day gig at MassMutual but spent his evenings in his basement making funny YouTube videos on investing, and posting on other social platforms that I don't understand. He believed that GameStop stock was undervalued, and his enthusiasm helped to cause an explosion in its price that made the short sellers sweat.

But the "dumb money"--apparently that's what hedge fund folk call individual small investors--was sweating too, of course. The movie, directed by Cruella's Craig Gillespie from a script by Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo (based on Ben Mezrich's's book The Antisocial Network), jumps around among a variety of GameStop investors who were riding the wave with Gill, and resisting the temptation to sell as a matter of economic principle, to the horror and bafflement of their families and friends. These include America Ferrera as a struggling Pittsburgh hospital worker and single mom; Talia Ryder and Myha'la Herrold as Texas college students besotted both with the investment and with each other, and Anthony Ramos as a GameStop employee who buys in.

I presume that some or all of these people are fictional "composites" representing the online rabble who collaborated on the short squeeze. They're nicely played and sympathetic. The millionaire and billionaire vultures are based on real players: Seth Rogen as Gabe Plotkin and Nick Offerman as Ken Griffin and Sebastian Shaw as Robinhood's Vlad Tenev and Vincent D'Onofrio, extra-creepy, as Steve Cohen. A scurvier bunch of parasitical cruds you'd have a hard time finding. Shailene Woodley is touching as Keith's supportive wife, Kate Burton and Clancy Brown are believable as his parents, and Pete Davidson is a perfect fit as the idiot brother.

Driven forward by a lot of stately, foul-mouthed hip-hop on the soundtrack and tricked out with split-screens and montages, Dumb Money cruises along absorbingly and, despite copious comedy, with an ambiguous tension--I wanted to see the hedge fund guys squirm, but I was anxious for the everyday people when they didn't sell. They, after all, need the money. The incidental backdrop of COVID adds to the unnerving atmosphere; the masks and empty malls and streets create an almost sci-fi flavor at times. It may be the first pandemic period piece.

Although the GameStop boom had fans as diverse as Elon Musk and AOC, I was never sure, watching this movie, that I wasn't falling for a simplistic interpretation of the events--the little guys banding together to take the big boys, who have rigged the system so only they can win, down a few notches. Is there another side here? I mean, no doubt GameStop was undervalued, but was it really that undervalued? Did this amount to a whimsical, sentiment-based pyramid scheme, even if it was motivated altruistically rather than as a con job?

One of the posters for the film reads "THE TOP 1% THINKS YOU'RE DUMB." No doubt they do, and as far as finance is concerned, in my case they aren't wrong. So if there's another, more negative, legitimately dumb side to this story, I'm not smart enough to see it.

In any case, I'm not prepared to shed a tear for the hedge funds. Despite the hit some of them took, in the end, the well-connected big investors appear to have pulled strings and avoided ruination; the film resigns itself to the game being rigged. But it also suggests that the big boys will think twice before they ignore the dumb money again, and it claims this as a triumph. As the movie presents the story, it's all but impossible not to invest in it--invest emotionally, that is.

SAM HE AM

Opening wide in the Valley this week:

 

The Hero—Last Friday, in my review of The Exception, I asked if any actor since Paul Newman has aged as well as Christopher Plummer. I meant the question rhetorically, but if somebody had countered it by suggesting Sam Elliot, I would have had to admit that, yeah, even allowing for the fact that he’s more than a decade younger than Plummer, the ol’ cowpoke is aging pretty spectacularly.

Pretty much the walking definition of the word “lanky,” Elliot has been around since the late ‘60s—his feature debut was a small role in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. He did studly, lackadaisical leading-man work in stuff like Frogs (1972) and the underrated Lifeguard (1976) and copious TV, including a season on Mission: Impossible. In the ‘80s, he appeared in many TV-movie and mini-series westerns, and the older he’s gotten—and the bushier his mustache has gotten—the more he seems like he was born for that genre.

He plays the title character in this drama. Or rather, he plays the actor who played the title character, in the only movie of his career, he says, that he’s proud of.

Lee Hayden is a has-been, pothead western movie and TV star. His career these days consists mostly of tedious voice-over work, in his beautiful deep rumble, for barbeque sauce commercials. Long divorced, he’s semi-estranged from his ex (Katharine Ross) and daughter (Krysten Ritter), but he has a vaguely father-son relationship with his washed-up-actor pot dealer (Nick Offerman), and while he’s underemployed, bored and not without regrets, his life isn’t unpleasant.

Or, rather, it would be pleasant, if it weren’t for that pesky pancreatic cancer diagnosis.

Directed by Brett Haley from a script he wrote with Marc Basch, The Hero traces how Lee’s condition, which he initially hides from his loved ones—he keeps coming up to the brink of telling them, and then chickening out—haunts his spaghetti-western-style dreams. We’re also shown his romance with the pearlescent Charlotte (Laura Prepon), around half his age, who shows up at the dealer’s house and takes a shine to Lee. She’s his date at a dinner at which he is given a life-achievement award, and from which a video of his drug-fueled acceptance speech “goes viral.” He suddenly, to his great confusion, finds himself back on the pop-culture radar.

Charlotte’s not the sort of woman who turns up every day, and Lee’s life isn’t like most people’s lives. For a while, I couldn’t help but wonder how I was supposed to feel too sorry for a guy who, at 71, gets to live in a lovely beach house, be given life achievement awards and go to bed with Laura Prepon. But of course that’s the point. Age and illness have a way of screwing up people’s lives just about the time they’re starting to learn how to live them properly—to know what’s really important.

It would be a mistake to dismiss the effortless grace of Elliot’s work here on the grounds that he’s “just playing himself.” First of all, he isn’t—Elliot has done plenty of voice-overs, certainly, but he’s never qualified as a has-been. If anything, he’s become more relevant as he’s gotten older. Admittedly, he’s sometimes been used semi-ironically—a slice of ‘70s beefcake that aged unusually well into a sort of hunk emeritus in films like The Big Lebowski and Up in the Air. In his one brief scene in 2015’s Grandma, however, he showed he could go deeper than this, giving a startlingly focused, emotional performance, maybe the best of his career.

Or, rather, maybe the best of his career until The Hero. Haley’s directorial touch is low-key, but the tension between Elliot’s iconic cowboy image and the character’s fear and sadness, his intense desire to live longer, is moving.