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.

TROPHY LIVES

Opening this week:

Trophy--If you want to hear the incongruously squeaky bleating that a young rhino makes beside its dead mother, or the oddly resigned groans and sighs of a mortally wounded elephant, this is the movie that will put them in your head, along with many other unshakeable sounds and sights. In other words, this documentary is not the sort of thing you recommend to just anybody.

It is, however, a painfully potent work that digs into commercial big-game hunting, and that industry's claim that it's a part of wildlife conservation efforts. It's full of blood-boiling sequences of pampered rich tourists being led by local guides within rifle range of pre-selected majestic animals, then giggling with excitement after they put a bullet in them, which usually only begins the process of killing them. The hunters seem entirely without self-consciousness about behaving this way on camera; they don't seem to realize that they're coming across like happy psychopaths.

Even so, this isn't just agitprop. The movie makes a serious attempt to get the bottom of the psychology that drives people--like the Jimmy Johns guy, like Trump's sons, like the dentist from Minnesota who killed Cecil the Lion--to seek grinning selfies with the carcasses of animals they've just killed. It also tries to make sense of the weird and maddening economics that underlie the pursuit, like the irony that "canned" hunting may indeed, through the breeding it requires, bolster the populations of some threatened animals.

Trophy focuses on several figures, but probably the most intense scrutiny is of a man named Philip Glass, not the minimalist composer but a sheep farmer and hunting enthusiast from Texas. Glass hopes to kill the "Big Five" of African game: Cape buffalo, leopard, lion, elephant and--most expensive because most scarce--rhino.

Near the beginning, Glass, speaking as a farmer, dismisses the naivete of people who view "all animals as pets" and can't see that "you raise a chicken to kill a chicken to eat a chicken." Even those of us who aren't vegetarians and live daily with some version of that equation can admit (if we're honest) that its implications aren't quite so simplistic, but in any case what Glass does on his carefully guided "hunts" in Africa has nothing to do with where McNuggets come from.

A soft-spoken, seemingly sweet-natured man, Glass insists, and truly seems to believe, that he loves the animals he shoots, and says that the act fills him with joy. But a different sort of release is suggested when he shoots a young elephant in Namibia, crows "Got him runnin' away!" and then smokes cigarettes with his guides, as if post-coital. This is tacitly contrasted, later, with the reflections of a Zimbabwean anti-poaching official who must occasionally, in the line of duty, legitimately kill an elephant that has become a threat to local people, and who describes how sad he finds it.

On the anti-hunting side of the equation, we meet John Hume, a South African businessman turned conservationist who keeps more than a thousand rhinos on his ranch. His tactic is to regularly harvest the horns. This makes the beasts worthless to poachers, but Hume would also like to be allowed to legally sell the horns in order to finance his operations. The trouble is that the South African government banned the sale of rhino horn, with the result that illegal poaching promptly spiked. It's another infuriating irony: the desperate Hume wants to use the absurd belief in the medicinal value of rhino horn--the main threat to the creatures--as a means to continue his preservation efforts.

The director here is Shaul Schwartz, of 2013's remarkable Narco Cultura, which explored a similar kind of cognitive dissonance in the form of the Mexican Narcocorrida music culture that celebrates drug-gang murders. With Trophy, Schwartz (with co-director Christina Clusiau) manages an even more epic sweep and, more significantly, richer and more disturbing human insights.

In an interview late in the film, Glass seems on the verge of revealing something telling about his relationship with his late father, who taught him to hunt (as he is shown teaching his own young son). But he just hints at his anger and stops short, and his smile seems frozen and queasy. It's intensely poignant and uncomfortable; one more in a movie full of moments that make you want to turn away, but also demand you look.

Stronger--Jake Gyllenhaal plays Jeff Bauman, a Bostonian Costco employee. A nice enough guy but an unreliable, less-than-ideal boyfriend, Jeff did manage to show up to cheer on his fed-up girlfriend Erin Hurley as she ran in the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013. As it happened, he was standing right next to one of the explosives that went off during the terrorist attack that morning. He lost his legs.

This sort of material has TV-movie written all over it, but director David Gordon Green and screenwriter John Pollono keep things restrained, refusing to exploit the story for melodrama or lurid shock. Make no mistake, there are brief scenes of graphic horror from which Green's camera doesn't flinch. But the focus is on Bauman's painful physical and psychological recovery, and the new level of maturity it gradually brought him.

On the other hand, Stronger doesn't offer us cheap uplift either. As played by Gyllenhaal, Jeff is fully-equipped with self-pity and excuses, not to mention confusion at why people keep calling him a "hero" for happening to stand next to a bomb. Yet what comes to the surface at his moments of greatest crisis--like when he learns his legs are gone--is humor, courage, perception. It's believable that his far more responsible girlfriend would be unable, despite all his faults, to fully disconnect from him.

Tatiana Maslany of Orphan Black is very touching as said girlfriend, by the way. Also excellent is Miranda Richardson as Bauman's addled mother, the best loving but dysfunctional Boston Mom since Melissa Leo in 2010's The Fighter.

One other thing: Costco comes across so well in this movie that you may wonder if they paid for product placement.