Jodie Foster (2016)
The title refers to a live daytime show on US cable television; to Lee Gates, the self-satisfied financial guru who presents this programme; and to the bête noire that Wall Street has become in current commercial cinema. A few weeks ago, Gates (George Clooney) urged viewers to invest in a company called IBIS Clear Capital. Twenty-four hours ago, IBIS shares plummeted, costing its investors $800 million. Now Lee Gates is scheduled to interview IBIS CEO Walt Camby (Dominic West) about the crash. Just before ‘Money Monster’ goes on air, the show’s director Patty Fenn (Julia Roberts) learns that Camby has gone away ‘on business’ and that Diane Lester (Caitriona Balfe), IBIS’s communications director, will deputise. Shortly after the start of transmission, a young delivery man (Jack O’Connell) appears in the ‘Money Monster’ studio, carrying boxes. When Lee Gates asks what he’s doing, the young man pulls a gun on him and tells Gates to open a box and put on what the box contains. This is a vest packed – the man says – with explosive that will detonate if he takes his thumb off the control that he’s holding. When Patty Fenn cuts the transmission he threatens to do that immediately so the broadcast resumes. The intruder’s name is Kyle Budwell (this is revealed quite some screen minutes later). He lost his life savings, inherited from his recently deceased mother, by following Lee Gates’s advice to buy IBIS shares. Kyle wants an explanation from Gates and from the absent Walt Camby of what went wrong, and he wants it on live television.
What follows is a hostage drama that unfolds in nearly real time. It sounds like a nifty idea but it’s clear from a very early stage that Jodie Foster lacks the imagination – or perhaps the nerve – fully to exploit the idea. Even before Lee Gates is taken hostage, Foster has described, in a conventionally ominous way, Kyle Budwell’s journey through the television studios and arrival on the edge of the set, and she continues to cut away – to bars whose customers follow the-drama-as-it-unfolds, to ‘key’ locations further afield (Seoul, Reykjavik, Johannesburg). The extraordinary TV event going on before the eyes of the cinema audience is soon submerged in very ordinary thriller-movie material. The set-up of Money Monster is similar to that of Retribution (2015) but the screenplay, by Jamie Linden, Alan DiFiore and Jim Kouf, thinks it worth diluting the claustrophobia of the situation for the sake of laying into big-time financial chicanery and making satirical points about the people who make and watch ‘Money Monster’. This latter aspect of Jodie Foster’s film is particularly slippery and, mostly as a result of that slipperiness, uncomfortable.
The IBIS crash was supposedly due to a ‘glitch’ in a trading algorithm. A likely story: Patty Fenn and Lee Gates resolve to discover what really happened. The outcome – to cut a lot of plot short – exposes Walt Camby as the thoroughgoing shit we assumed he was anyway. The TV ‘Money Monster’ team’s quick thinking is interesting only, and only briefly, in that it further unsettles Kyle Budwell. More remarkable is that the movie Money Monster team appears to accept Patty and Lee as suddenly investigative journalists. There’s barely any irony in the presentation of their attack-as-the-best-means-of-defence – barely any suggestion that they’re impelled by commercial instinct as well as by a passion for truth. Jodie Foster’s treatment of the public response to Kyle Budwell is less tolerant. ‘Ordinary people’, as the media now routinely calls us, are shown to be volatile – not because that’s the nature of public opinion but because Foster wants to have it all ways. Early on, the people watching Lee Gates being held hostage look unimpressed to the point of boredom. The shocking implication that TV audiences nowadays are suffering from this-is-really-happening fatigue gives way to more predictable displays of heartless voyeuristic delight, in the streets and on other TV shows. When Kyle Budwell is eventually shot dead, the barroom viewers are no longer jaded. Their quietness now suggests a dignified empathy with the fate of a fellow ordinary person.
What really vindicates Lee Gates and Patty Fenn, in the view of those behind Money Monster, is that they’re played by George Clooney and Julia Roberts. The film reeks of self-approval, on the part of its stars and its movie-star director, but without any hint of being aware that this is the impression given. The movie-makers’ understanding of giving the public what it wants (Clooney is also one of the producers) is just as sound as that of Lee and Patty. The zeitgeist makes it morally sufficient to excoriate the practices of the financial world – and commercially shrewd to do so too. Money Monster, which cost $27m to make, has, in less than a month, taken $67m at the box office.
It’s something of a relief that George Clooney is too good an actor to get away with this. Clooney the political animal no doubt engages with the moral of the story that Jodie Foster is telling. He may, through his sentimental attachment to a nobler age of television, like the idea of the medium, even in the corrupt form of Lee Gates’s show, enabling a Damascene conversion. But George Clooney the charismatic actor creates in the early scenes a portrait of Gates that’s sharp enough to lodge in the viewer’s mind and to keep us aware of the hollowness of the changed man he becomes. Patty Fenn doesn’t need to be improved in the same way. As well as being Lee’s director, she’s also his current lover and she’s quickly shown to be the good woman in waiting for the better-man-she-knows-he-can-be. At the end of the movie, they’re together eating the Asian takeaway he pooh-poohed at the start as a loser’s supper (Lee tells Patty he’s dined out every night ‘since the nineties’). In between, Patty has shown herself as resourceful as she’s nerveless – especially since it’s her boyfriend wearing the semtex waistcoat! It seems surprising that Patty’s intelligent professionalism in extremis is enough for Julia Roberts (and Jodie Foster) not to find this woman’s role essentially demeaning.
Casting Jack O’Connell as Kyle Budwell seems meant to complement the Clooney-Roberts glamour with a gritty realness that’s appropriate to the film’s conception. If this was the idea, it doesn’t come to fruition. O’Connell works hard but doesn’t get across enough of Kyle’s scared cluelessness, once he’s taken Gates hostage, as to what to do next. (O’Connell too often gives the impression that he’s waiting for Jodie Foster to tell him what to do next.) In any case, although this kind of scenario tends to be regarded as intensely ‘cinematic’, it’s a lot harder for actors to develop through multiple takes the momentum they might achieve in a theatre two-hander. Jack O’Connell is badly served too by the screenplay’s condescending idea of working-class desperation – this is more garishly evident in the case of Kyle’s pregnant girlfriend (Emily Meade). The writing of the sequences at IBIS headquarters is lame and Jodie Foster’s direction of these exchanges perfunctory. Elsewhere, she keeps the action zippy although I wasn’t sure if the bits featuring an NYPD contingent were meant to be as laughable as they are. I was sure that, as the senior officer in this group, Giancarlo Esposito was utterly wasted.
9 June 2016
