During the Great Depression, people who barely had money for food still scraped together enough to go to the movies. Movies served a real function for Americans for people caught in mass economic despair: the tough, wise-cracking, attractive people they saw in those films made them feel as if they were a part of something larger and more hopeful than their own daily lives. Like FDR's radio addresses, they helped weave a sense that everybody was in this mess together. It would be a welcome thing to feel something like that together, but it's harder to pull off in a two-color country that seems to be divided into two halves that are in a constant state of cultural civil war. But as Wall Street investors price used copies of Final Exit on the Internet and prospective retirees wave a fond farewell to their 401Ks, there are still movies that reflect or comment on our current situation and that we might turn to for edification, or just to feel a little less alone.
One such is Boiler Room, which in 2000 marked the writing-directing debut of Ben Younger. It stars Giovanni Ribisi as a college dropout who, like nine out of ten male characters you see in anything these days whose scummy behavior is meant to be seen half-sympathetically, has father issues. (His dad, played by Ron Rifkin, is a federal judge who makes no secret of his disappointment in junior's disdain for a life based on learning and public service.) Ribisi is first seen running an underground gambling casino in his Queens home; this, it turns out, is great preparation for his next big career move, hustling stock for a fly-by-night brokerage firm called J. T. Marlin. It's a bucket shop where the brokers spend their days in a toxic-looking office, making phone calls to sell worthless stock in dying or defunct companies to suckers who know that there's a lot money to be made in this mysterious entity known as "the market" but don't understand anything else about it. The brokers themselves are classic examples of that modern American success story type, the swaggering dumb guys who think they're smart because they've mastered a line of patter that enables them to cash in on folks dumber than they are. They actually do make a lot of money very fast--they get to keep way more of their proceeds than they would working in a legitimate firm--and, for them, the thrill is in spending it. They also seem to spend most of their time away from the office hanging out with each other, which means that their flashing spending is meant to impress each other. It's an ongoing circle jerk, which can be maintained until the guys grow up enough to get bored with living their version of the Maxim life or until the Feds show up at the office with warrants and a battering ram. Guess which is more likely to happen first.
Boiler Room isn't especially complex in either its narrative or its moral vision, but Younger claims to have actually worked in one of these outfits, and the movie has a journalistic-anthropological viewpoint that keeps it interesting. Part of its fascination comes from the fact these are small-timers, living on the margins and working on borrowed time. Part of what's interesting is that they've seen the same movies we have and don't have the guile to try to hide the fact that they've turned to those movies for life models: they revel in their shared desire to be Gordon Geccos. When the gather for a sleepover at the home of the company recruiter (Ben Affleck), they pile around the big-screen TV and watch Wall Street, singing out the lines as if they were at The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Cunningly, Younger gives them lines that actually evoke the sweaty hustlers of Glengarry Glen Ross, which is a lot closer to their speed. (Baldwin's supporting role is very close to Alec Baldwin's cameo in Glengarry, and his flashy-packaging-with-nothing-inside quality has never been better utilized.) Wall Street itself has a contradiction at its core that is common to a lot of Oliver Stone's work: he wants to put characters he disapproves of onscreen so that he can preach against them and expose their lives as worthless, yet he shares the boiler room guys' admiration for big swinging dicks, and he can't resist inflating his scumbag characters to awe-inspiring proportions, so that they'll be worthy of his epic-maker's gaze. The Boiler Room boys--their ranks also include Vin Diesel, Nicky Katt, and Scott Caan--are losers in fancy tailoring and expensive suits, unaware that the five-hundred-pound weight is about to drop on their heads. Maybe because of this, they're kind of likable, for all their macho bluster. (Vin Diesel's role is smaller than you might guess from his prominent place on the DVD cover, but he has perhaps his best scene to date as an actor when he has a buyer on the ropes and puts the call on speaker so that the other guys in the room can admire his footwork and cheer him on to the finish line.) After all, these days, just about all of us are small-timers.