“Money is a whore that sleeps with you, but never sleeps.” The phrase is from Gordon Gekko and it remains there as irrefutable proof that lack of scruples, shamelessness and suspenders necessarily generate as much bile as they do guilty pleasure. Testosterone comes from the factory. Wall Street, the 1987 film signed by Oliver Stone and of which the aforementioned Gekko was absolute king, not only gave an image to a time of deregulated markets and unregulated cocaine, but also managed to make something so apparently gracelessly as the buildings of the stock exchange suddenly acquired the same glamor as Versailles in the time of Louis XIV. From then to now, films like The wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, 2013) o The big bet (Adam Mckay, 2016) have done nothing more than insist on the same idea: greed is photogenic and generates hatred, and even disgust, with the same evidence as envy, and a feeling of guilt. And so.
“To a large extent, my film is just the opposite,” he says. Craig Gillespie in a determined effort to mark distances. He is the director of Golpe a Wall Street and his hero, Keith Gill, the one who gives life Paul Dano, It has nothing to do with the one played by Michael Douglas, much less with the one played by Leonardo DiCaprio. He is, in the good sense of the word, a good man who, through his YouTube channel and social networks, fought evil, that is, capital. «Hollywood has a long tradition of ordinary men who find themselves involved in an extraordinary situation. It’s difficult to identify with a scamming bastard, but it’s not difficult to see yourself in front of a person like you and ask yourself: What would I do in his place? », He says.
To situate ourselves, Golpe a Wall Street tells one of those stories, always so rare, in which the bad guys lose. Even if it’s just for a moment. We are in 2021, the pandemic is ravaging and a group of users from the Reddit forum coordinated to buy shares of the popular video game store chain that appears in the title of the film at a low price. What they achieved was multiplying its value by 30. The unexpected activity of the legion of ordinary women and men in such an extraordinary situation caused a loss of billions of dollars to large investment funds such as Melvin Capital. That a rich man loses, it’s nice, but that a rich man who is also obviously a villain does it, is already quite a pleasure. Indeed, the fun of the game was that these giants, worthy heirs of Gekko, dedicated themselves to betting against companies close to bankruptcy to increase their profits to the point of paroxysm at the expense of their losses (“dumb money” in the jargon). And one more chapter: the scandal broke out at the moment when houses supposedly in charge of doing good and democratizing access to the stock market (here, Robinhood) limited the purchase of shares to users. That is, they cheated.
“I remember,” says the director, “that I experienced all of this firsthand for the simple reason that my son was one of those who spent the confinement due to the pandemic trying his luck in the stock market. And he was there, with all the tension of when to sell and at what price. “He also experienced outrage and anger when Robinhood stopped trading in collusion with investment funds.” Pause. And it continues: «The relevant thing about this story is that people saw and experienced firsthand that the system was and is rigged in favor of the powerful. That which is always suspected and even taken for granted – but which is impossible to prove since the system is unfair, but not stupid – was completely exposed.
It is still ironic that the book on which everything is based is signed by the same author, Ben Mezrich, on which David Fincher’s film was based. La red social. The sarcasm is that the new text has as its title La red antisocial. The scriptwriters Rebecca Angelo and Lauren Schuker Blum They manage to turn and even crush the technicalities into an authentic, labyrinthine and, most importantly, transparent festival of images. «The temptation was for the characters to explain what was happening. Until we realized that we had an arsenal of memes and television spots that served the same purpose,” says Gillespie just before addressing the issue of masks. The other big narrative problem.