In her new movie, Jodie Foster, the acclaimed actress and occasional director, turns her attention to the wolves and lambs of Wall Street. Money Monster is set over the course of a very eventful day in the lives of the crew of a market analysis television show. The title is derived from the ratings-friendly dose of financial razzmatazz that is hosted by Lee Gates (George Clooney). Lee likes to jazz up routine stock tips and market analyses by including cartoonish graphics, dramatic sound and visual effects, clips from old films, dancers and more to relieve the routine. This is business journalism married with big-top entertainment and delivered by Lee’s practised prattle, day in and day out.
But this aesthetic travesty is not the reason one viewer gatecrashes a live broadcast to put a gun to Lee’s head. Kyle (Jack O’Connell) is very angry because he has lost his savings on an enthusiastic tip from Lee about the Ibis Corporation, run by Walt Camby (Dominic Cooper). Kyle straps a bomb vest to Lee and demands to know why Ibis’s stock plummeted overnight, losing lose hundreds of millions of dollars in value. Camby is somewhere on a jet and unreachable, and it’s up to Lee’s supremely efficient and cool-headed producer Patty (Julia Roberts) to prevent Money Monster’s encounter with reality television from reaching a tragic conclusion.There’s plenty of material here for a rich and well-timed satire on the cynicism that guides programming decisions at television networks: the initial disbelief that greets the hostage-taking act (some viewers think that Lee has introduced a new stunt on his show) and the studio floor-management skills that Patty brings to the situation. Patty deftly manages to stay a few steps ahead of Kyle. He may have a gun and a bomb, but she has a console and an ear-mic.
There’s a sharp sequence in which Lee tries to push up the Ibis stock to prove his influence over his viewers, but flops miserably. The hostage scenes have the requisite tension and wry humour, and Foster perfectly captures the ratings opportunity that the crisis brings along.
Let’s not have too much fun here, though, since this is a drama about the horrible 1% and the ways in which they hammer the rest of the population into the ground. There’s naïve hand-wringing about Ibis’s shady deals in South Africa and finger-wagging at the general lack of morals that characterises the American financial world. The movie’s gee-whiz discourse is in the mould of Oliver Stone’s similarly righteous takedown of stock market culture in Wall Street, which at least had a better villain in the brilliantly named Gordon Gekko than Cooper’s ineffective Walt Camby. Films such as The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) and The Big Short (2015) land their critique of the amorality that characterises financial markets the world over with greater acuity and humour.
Despite strenuously ignoring its tremendous potential for black comedy, Money Monster ticks along on the assured turns by its star leads. Julia Roberts is especially lovely as the dream producer who, in a less toothless movie, would have been the real monster in the studio.
