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.

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG BOYCHIK

In theaters for Thanksgiving (a safe and Happy Thanksgiving, by the way!):

The Fabelmans--It begins with little Sammy Fabelman being taken to his first movie, in New Jersey in 1952. A cautious, slightly fretful 7-year-old, Sammy (Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord) is not sure if he's up for the experience; he's heard the people onscreen are gigantic, and the idea worries him. So his adoring parents attempt to reassure him, from opposite sides: his practical-minded, scientific dad Burt (Paul Dano) explains how film works technically, while his whimsical pixie of a mom Mitzi (Michelle Williams) says that movies are beautiful dreams.

The dream in question turns out to be DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth, and the big train wreck scene hits Sammy's psyche like...well, like a speeding train. He tries to re-create it with the Lionel train set he gets for Hannukah, and later he films his re-creations with a home movie camera.

As you probably know, this is Steven Spielberg's autobiographical coming-of-age movie, scripted by Tony Kushner from a synopsis they worked up together, and made by the usual gang: filmed by Janusz Kaminski with a score by John Williams. The episodes that follow depict the family's life as Burt, a computer genius, chases work in the budding industry from New Jersey to Arizona, where Sammy makes war epics, to northern California, where he encounters anti-Semitic bullies.

Mitzi, who gave up a career as a concert pianist to be a wife and mom, shows signs of restlessness and depression, except when she's interacting with Burt's best friend Bennie (Seth Rogen), or when she impulsively buys a monkey, who she names Bennie. All of these strands are filtered through the growth of the relationship between Sam (Gabriel LaBelle as an older kid) and the art and craft of moviemaking.

Even though he's one of the most commercially successful popular artists in the world, I think that Spielberg has, in a sense, been critically underappreciated for decades. After the initial, unprecedented splash he made with Jaws,  Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. and Raiders of the Lost Ark, he went through a slump in the late '80s and early '90s and cranked out some real bummers; cloying, heavy-handed, trying-too-hard stuff like Hook and Always that made him seem like a phony.

I'm not sure that many critics noticed the way he rediscovered and deepened and sharpened his style with the films he's made in recent years, even when their scripts have sometimes been uneven. Works that range with seemingly equal ease from crisp yet almost invisible technique like The Post to Hitchcockian panache like Bridge of Spies to flashy showmanship like West Side Story suggest an artist who has matured, and who might have something interesting to say about his own life.

And so he does, by turning his gaze outward. Sammy is likable enough, but he's not a rich or idiosyncratic protagonist. What's important is his point of view on Burt and Mitzi. Spielberg here dramatizes the anger and terror, the sense of betrayal, that can result when you begin to see your parents--as Sammy does through his footage of them, while editing home movies--not as stock figures in your story but as complex characters in their own.

And Dano and Williams create vivid, warm portraits of imperfect but unconditionally loving people. So does Rogen, and so does Judd Hirsch in a showcase role as a crazy visionary uncle who tells Sammy hard prophetic truths. So do Jeannie Berlin and Robin Bartlett as the Grandmas, and so do the excellent kids who play the younger sisters. So for that matter, does the monkey.

Not everything in The Fabelmans comes off. There's maybe a scene or two more than is needed of Williams sadly playing sad piano, and the stuff with the bullies, who look like they stepped out of Nazi poster art, feels psychologically confused and uneasy. A scene in which Sammy has a fraught confrontation with a bully he's tried to flatter through moviemaking is potentially interesting for what it hints at about the director's willingness to use his art calculatingly, but it thrashes around and fails, somehow, to come into dramatic focus.

On the other hand, the scenes involving Sammy's early romantic encounters are livened up by the hilarious Chloe East as Monica, his both religiously ecstatic and sexually avid girlfriend, who sees Jesus as one more teen heartthrob. While chaste in the typical Spielbergian manner, they offer a peek at the character's, and the director's, bemused reaction to Christianity.

The movie closes with a depiction of Spielberg's familiar anecdote about his first brush with Hollywood greatness. It allows him to end the film with a self-deprecating "meta" joke that also slyly reminds us that what we've just seen, however honestly intended, is nonetheless a carefully curated official story.

A LONG DARK KNIGHT

Opening this weekend...

The Batman--Time for yet another retelling of the tale of the poor little rich boy, orphaned by criminals, who dresses up as a bat and deploys gadgetry to fight crime. This version, we're assured, is "dark." Not colorful and campy, like the '60s-era TV show; not whimsical, like the Tim Burton series of the '80s and '90s; not epic and Wagnerian, like the more recent series featuring the laryngitic Christian Bale. Strange how durable and flexible this silly myth has proven.

This one is indeed dark, both literally and thematically; dim and shadowy and focused on hidden corruption. Directed by Matt Reeves from a script he wrote with Peter Craig, The Batman is set early in the career of Bruce Wayne (Robert Pattinson) as the Caped Crusader. His costume, gizmos and vehicles seem like works in progress, and his Gotham police ally James Gordon (Jeffery Wright) is a Lieutenant, not yet the Commissioner.

Gordon and The Batman are looking for The Riddler (Paul Dano), who is bumping off prominent members of Gotham's law enforcement community, and whose cryptic messages to our hero suggest that he's trying to drag some of the city's slimy secrets into the light. Gotham underworld figures like Carmine Falcone (John Turturro) and The Penguin (Colin Farrell, buried in makeup) are involved, as is young Selina Kyle (Zoe Kravitz), who's investigating the disappearance of her girlfriend. The lithe, acrobatic Selina dresses in cat-like gear and has an apartment full of cats; she is, you might say, a cat woman.

There's a lot to like about the movie. Grieg Fraser's cinematography has a dank and gloomy beauty, and seeing The Batman recoil in fear when he comes to the edge of a tall building or miscalculate a descent and clip himself painfully against an overpass is a highly agreeable counter to the parkour-style effortlessness of so many contemporary action heroes.

The actors are strong, too. Pattinson is low-key, but he has the same sallow, Byronic glamour he's shown in other roles, and he's sympathetic, as is Wright, and Andy Serkis as a fretful Alfred. Turturro and Farrell bring a realistic feel to their mobster parts, and Peter Sarsgaard makes his shady D.A. squirmy and weaselly but also pitiable.

The standouts are Dano and Kravitz; Dano's rather squalid take on the Riddler turns truly scary when he starts stretching his words out into deep, indignant bellows. He seems far less like a movie supervillain and more like the pathetic, yet more terrifying, attempts of real-life crazies to emulate a supervillain (as in Aurora, Colorado). Kravitz brings the movie a much-needed breeze of brisk but breathable fresh air. She's the audience surrogate in the film; despite her feats of derring-do she comes across as more sensible and relatable than anyone else.

Against all of these merits, The Batman is too long. It's way too freakin' long. It's nearly three hours of above-average moviemaking of its kind, but three hours is a heavy dose of shadows and fog. The brooding atmosphere suggests that we're in for devastating, morally challenging revelations, but what we get, while coherent, isn't especially surprising. And then, just as we seem to have gotten to the bottom of the case, the movie tacks on a blowed-up-real-good disaster finale that feels jarringly out of tune with the more intimate crime-story flavor of what has gone before.

I thought that superhero pictures were starting to cure themselves of their straining need to pile on climax after climax, seemingly in frantic fear that audiences will feel that they haven't been given enough for their money. The Batman is a step backward in this regard.

It occurred to me that The Batman feels, in atmosphere and pretensions, exactly like what was so sublimely spoofed by 2017's The Lego Batman Movie. It isn't every day that the target of a parody shows up five years after the parody itself.