“Are you listening? Are you paying attention out there? It’s about to get complicated.”
Or not. Listening to Lee (George Clooney) over a black screen at the start of Money Monster, you might think you should be paying attention. But no. When Lee appears,on the set where he performs his Jim Cramer-style show, “Money Monster”, it’s clear that this is exactly what he’s doing, performing a character, a clown who’s loud, frantic, and wholly annoying, straining to dance with a couple of hard-faced girls in tight outfits. The bass-heavy-hip-hop-ish backing track underlines that the show is as empty as the opening salvo. Nothing here is complicated. It’s just lurid.
This leads to another possibility for complication, that the movie will be breaking down how these sorts of shows — shows that pretend to instruct or voice your frustrations — are more distraction than information, more opiate than sustenance. Even if you haven’t given much thought to this matter, the film slams home Lee’s obnoxiousness and oblivion.
In between episodes, he’s shot from overhead, sitting on a toilet with pants down and cellphone in hand. He trades workplace jokes with his director, Patty (Julia Roberts), but her tight smiles make clear she’s weary of her star’s shtick, going along to get the job done but also pushing back to let you know you’re not supposed to approve of him either. “It’s always so simple yet so moronic,” she says, rejecting what he’s saying but making sure he gets on air to say it.
By the time Patty’s telling him he might take a breath, maybe go home and watch TV in his pajamas and he’s explaining he never eats alone at home, that his multiple ex-wives are only signs of their greed and his admirably insatiable appetites, your idea of Lee is pretty fixed. He’ll be learning a lesson, she’ll be watching him, wisely and patiently. That plot is common enough that you wouldn’t think it needs much explanation, but Money Monster provides it anyway.
And so, you learn, though you know already, that Lee’s show is just one of many, a front for the deceits and fantasies strung together by Wall Street, global corporations, bankers and politicians in bed with those corporations, all the usual one-percenters. Money Monster sets up its own emblematic easy target early on, a company called Ibis Clear Capital, which has just lost $800 million to a “computer glitch”.
The movie spends long minutes exposing the backstage mechanics of the TV show, how the set looks from the control booth, how camera operators and guys with boom mics do their jobs, how they create fantasies day in and day out. But no one here fathoms that the glitch story is a fantasy, that Wall Street deals are fictions and the system is, as you’ve no doubt heard, “rigged”. Imagine how surprised everyone is when a kid from outside their set, a working class New Yorker named Kyle (Jack O’Connell), shows up with a gun and a suicide vest and points out exactly that.
Earnest and dour, Kyle’s not only mad at Lee the person, but also Lee the face of a corrupt system. He names Ibis CEO Walt Camby (Dominic West) too, who’s conveniently gone missing. Lee goes missing in his own way, pleading ignorance of this obvious deception, saying he thought the company was good, that the glitch was no one’s fault, Kyle sees the glitch as a cover and also as standard practice.
The very obviousness of Kyle’s truth-telling also underlines the movie’s status as something like farce. Money Monster draws inspiration from Dog Day Afternoon and Network, not to mention Inside Man, all incisive cultural critiques that double as effective thrillers and dark comedies. But these comparisons also reduce Money Monster, its critique too facile, its delivery neither thrilling nor especially funny.
While such unevenness might be part of the point, the chaos represented by Kyle is set against the order of the corruption as an imbalance that’s designed to serve those who know how it works. What he’s doing isn’t illegal, says the villain, it’s just the way it all works. In this, Walt almost recalls Trump’s own siren call, identifying the loophole, bragging about his exploitation of it, celebrating his win at the expense of all the woeful losers. Walt’s moral failings couldn’t be clearer, reflected in the pain on Kyle’s face, a face that Patty sees, with you, in close-up after close-up.
While Patty serves as your stand-in, you might think of her as an empathetic viewer. Still, the audience her show solicits tends to be exactly the opposite, cruel and disparaging, eager to turn on celebrities like Lee, assuming the worst of the “losers” they see on TV. Money Monster doesn’t even pretend to make this point carefully. It cuts repeatedly to rooms full of watchers, in a diner, in a bar, on sidewalks. As the melodrama escalates, viewers turn from their phones to look at the spectacle on TV screens.
The movie is stuck between indictments, making cases against the makers and the consumers, the cheaters and the cheated. Everyone’s caught up in this noisy mess and no one is listening.