Grade: B-
My two favorite scenes in Dumb Money have little to nothing to do with the plot. One takes place at a gas station. It’s late 2020, and America Ferrera’s character is exchanging a few pleasantries with an attractive man by himself, also fueling up. She remarks that it’s nice to talk to a human in person, and to see their whole face. They never see each other again, and a movie romance doesn’t spontaneously materialize. My other favorite scene is at the dinner table with our lead character and his family. There is a bit of “shop talk,” but a sweet family dynamic is allowed to stick its head out of the gopher hole. In a film that’s mainly too rat-a-tat-tat for its own good, it’s nice to see bits like these two. More of them, please.
Dumb Money is a movie that takes us back to economics class. It bogs us down with detail after detail about the mechanics of the plot, while barely coming up for air to give us personalities. Boiler Room and BlackBerry are excellent movies because they succeed at laying on the nitty gritty about bro-posturing over stocks and shares, while also having narrative value you can really get invested in, no pun intended. When done poorly, you have something like The Big Short or The Wolf of Wall Street. Dumb Money is in between.
In early 2021, I remember hearing rumblings from an exuberant co-worker, going on and on to his customers at the bar about the GameStop situation. If I live to be 1000, I might never understand what stocks are – though movies I’ve admired have been made about it, and Dumb Money is a decent enough one. It works as well as it does due to the performances. Paul Dano, from The Fabelmans, looks the part and shows he can carry another film. He plays Keith Gill, known as Roaring Kitty on Reddit. He, and many of his followers, became quite wealthy “on paper” by buying GameStop stock. He is something of a market Rain Man, with an uncanny ability to remember what’s happened so he can predict how things will play out. At one point, he’s up 22 million, but continues to “hold.” “If he’s still in, I’m still in,” say his subscribers.
Shailene Woodley, who showed so much promise in The Fault in Our Stars, shines as Dano’s wife. When it comes to supportive, encouraging spouses, she is almost at the Lady MacBeth level. She has such an earnest, caring, thoughtful delivery, and I can’t wait to see more and more of her. I will always welcome Clancy Brown, and we also have Seth Rogen, Vincent D’Onofrio, Pete Davidson, and many others who bring the energy. I was not surprised to learn that director Craig Gillespie did I, Tonya – a movie that also was on speed, but I enjoyed more. Dumb Money has no shortages of gimmicky, TikTok style montages. Endless references to masks, new vaccines, BLM, and George Floyd are in abundance, in case we forget when this takes place.
There is so much going on here, and so much they want to tell us, that it ends with the longest epilogue caption sequence I’ve ever seen. “Here’s what happened to this person, and here’s what happened with this company, etc…” The pass-fail cutoff for me is B minus and C plus. The former represents the worst good movies, while the best bad ones begin with the latter grade. I am barely recommending Dumb Money. There’s just enough in it that I liked to make me pad the rating. But it’s full of a lot of hot air that doesn’t take it anywhere.
Grade: B-
Film Reviews by Mark 
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