The last time America felt this bad about itself was the 1970s, and perhaps the only enduringly positive result of that time was how that rotten mood led to some genuinely great moviemaking. One could say the same today about television, and indeed the dark, anxious, impending-doom-like spirit of the great cable TV programs mirrors the pessimism of the present just as Hollywood reflected the Vietnam-Watergate-OPEC-inflation days.
Perhaps only one medium at a time can capture the zeitgeist, because Hollywood is now as awash in escapist banality as television was during the previous American low. That banality extends even to earnest efforts to evoke the kinds of movies Hollywood used to make in the 1970s.
The new George Clooney-Julia Roberts picture Money Monster was directed by Jodie Foster, whose participation in the great 1976 Martin Scorsese film Taxi Driver nearly changed history when it inspired the near-assassination of Ronald Reagan. It is not Scorsese to whom the movie pays homage but rather Sidney Lumet, who directed Dog Day Afternoon in 1975 and Network in 1976. Money Monster is, like Dog Day Afternoon, the story of a hostage-taking in New York City that unfolds over the course of a few hours; and like Network, it is a partly satirical portrait of an unserious television culture and its terrible impact on people’s daily lives.
These are good movies to emulate. But if you’re going to emulate a good movie, or make any kind of movie, the movie you make ought to be good, too. Money Monster isn’t. Quite the opposite, in fact.
First, Foster asks us to believe that a weird-looking guy carrying a package could somehow sneak through security up the elevators and right onto the set of a live cable-television program dedicated to stock picks—all the while carrying a gun and a Semtex-lined vest. We are then asked to believe that he will force the vest onto the person of the Jim Cramer simulacrum played by George Clooney. Our hostage-taker is a working-class kid from Brooklyn, but he knows enough about the inner workings of television that he can tell when the network feed is and isn’t running and how to force the show’s director, Julia Roberts, to keep him on the air while he berates Clooney for giving him a bad stock tip.
Clooney is supposed to be playing a ridiculous, cynical clown who doesn’t understand that people are risking their financial futures on his recommendations. But Clooney doesn’t know how to look silly, and just looks silly trying to look silly. And, of course, it turns out that his character isn’t really the villain but just another chump in the Machiavellian hands of an evil billionaire—who tanked his own company’s stock in order to make money off a strike in a South African mine. Or something.
I’d go on about how lousy this movie is, and immoral, but the point here is that it’s just astoundingly false. No such thing could ever happen, and the ludicrousness of the proceedings just grows as Clooney and his kidnapper exit the studio to confront the billionaire. The opposite was true of Dog Day Afternoon, which was based on a true story about a married Brooklyn bank robber who was stealing money to buy his boyfriend a sex-change operation. It felt like a documentary—and so, in its own odd way, did Network, even though it’s deliberately outrageous and ends with the greatest punch line in movie history (“This was the story of Howard Beale, the first known instance of a man who was killed because he had lousy ratings”). Money Monster is what would happen if Robert Reich (who appears in the movie’s final minute) drank a bottle of crème de menthe and then wrote a screenplay about Wall Street.
Hollywood’s other recent 1970s fiasco is The Nice Guys, a misbegotten attempt at a buddy-comedy private-eye flick set in 1977 Los Angeles. Cowriter/director Shane Black doesn’t know whether he’s making a parody of such films or an homage to them, and the result is as soft, lumpy, flavorless, and rotted as a three-week-old cantaloupe.
Ryan Gosling plays the world’s worst detective and gives an astonishingly ill-conceived performance—at one point, the movie stops for a minute while, seeing a dead body, Gosling does a full-on Lou Costello imitation. Lou Costello was bad enough; having to see him copied is like entering the ninth circle of Hell.
Gosling’s Bud Abbott here is Russell Crowe, who is fitfully amusing but who looks as though he’s still in shock from the fact that he derailed his career by throwing a phone at a desk clerk’s head in the lobby of a chic New York hotel in 2005. But then, this is not the right era for Crowe. He should be in better movies than this; indeed, an actor as fearless as he is would have been a perfect Hollywood star of the 1970s. He should go into television. But if he does sign up for True Detective: Season 3, Ryan Gosling must not be allowed to do it with him.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard‘s movie critic.
