Money Monster

Like Spotlight, Money Monster  revives the lost ideal of responsible, investigative journalism. Lee Gates (George Clooney) is a TV showman who does vaudeville acts to flog his financial coverage. “We don’t even do journalism,” his sharp producer (Julia Roberts) admits. Gates initially embodies the modern media’s — like the government’s — sellout to corporate America. Then his cocooned complacency is upset by the invasion by a threatening bomber outraged that Gates’s glib recommendation caused the man’s — and many other helpless schnooks’ —  financial ruin.

As the world watches Kyle Budwell’s siege their stunned sympathy catches the frustration and rage that fuel the Sanders and Trump revolutions. The corrupt business executive Walt Camby steals north of $80,000,000 to finance an African adventure while his trusting shareholders are left broke an broken.  In a comic replay of the citizens’ impotence, a staffer tests a new erectile cream — but is prematurely rushed away on assignment. For the showman, of course, courage in investing is imaged as impressive balls.

As his name suggests Gates proves to be a pathway. He develops some sympathy for his attacker, especially after the boy’s pregnant girlfriend rages at him instead of pleading for his survival. The showbiz team turns serious when a friendly network of hackers exposes Camby’s lies and fraud. Gates is determined to get Kyle some answers, to justify his campaign. In the end he does, but he can’t save the lad’s life. 

The film operates on several levels of reversal. As the financial “journalist” plays showbiz the usual array of real newsmen, like the ubiquitous Wolf Blitzer, show up as themselves. Apparently no one has told them that if they play fictional versions of themselves in Hollywood fictions they squander whatever credibility they may have had on their own news shows. The very casting proves the film’s starting thesis: Americans are merely entertained where they need to be informed.  

The reversal of the pregnant girl’s usually sentimental appeal to her man parallels the film’s overall sense of an America in which normal loyalties have been lost to rabid self-interest. The casting plays a romantic twist on this. Clooney and Roberts in a movie, that promises scenes of electric romance. But no, in the bulk of their scenes they aren’t even together, just shot and framed separately as she communicates from the production booth to his earpiece. They connect but are separated, an emblem of a fractured union, a fractured country. Only at the end do they meet. She abandons her new job after he admitted his need for her. That adds a romantic tinge to the illusion of justice restored.

  And it is just an illusion. Villain Camby will be investigated but as he says, he didn’t break any law when he exploited the corrupt system. Remembering how all the real-life villains behind the mortgage calamity went scot-free, we have little hope he will suffer proper punishment here. And after a montage of saddened faces, the representative citizens shaken by the boy’s needless killing, the normal life of games and anodynes resumes: a guy resumes his bar game of fusball. Emotions give way to an automaton.
The film delights in reversals. When Gates twigs to the fact that the FBI are trying to shoot him, he uses the terrorist as his shield to get from the studio to the Camby interview. In that irony we’re reminded you can’t tell the good guys from the bad any more. Trump is counting on that.