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Frothing with 3 parts avarice and two parts synthetic male hormone, writer-director Ben Younger's paean to profit for the sheer thrill of it is an outlandishly cartoonish exaggeration. At least, let's hope that's what it is.
To think that this frantic saga about young men in stock-trading sweatshops selling their morals wholesale has more basis in fact than in satire would indeed be hardtack for the psychological digestion. Worse is the nightmarish thought that future generations might look back at Boiler Room and knowledgeably opine, "Yup, great period piece, typical of the stock market boom during the late 20th and early 21st centuries; anything for a buck back then, you know." And when Boiler Room's ranting divulgences are especially convincing, the applicable words of the poet ominously come to mind: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked...." (Howl, by Allen Ginsberg, 1956).
It also bears noting that Mr. Younger's seething diatribe of the securities game treads dangerously close to misogynistic ground. For starters, save for one mother figure and a secretary (Nia Long) stereotypically enlisted for Mata Hari duty by the FBI, there are no truly important female roles.
But a far more indicting sequence has to do with the instructions newcomer Seth (Giovanni Ribisi) receives on his first day at J.T. Marlin, a firm isolated suspiciously far from Wall Street in the hinterlands of Long Island. Explaining that women are just too much trouble to deal with, Ben Affleck, in an homage to the fear-motivating role Alec Baldwin portrayed in Glengarry Glen Ross, orders: "We don't pitch the B_ _ _ _ ". But while this is meant to depict the folkways and mores of the sub-culture in question, one gets the impression that the screenplay is enjoying the tenor of its vindictive manifesto a tad too much. Or maybe I'm married to a feminist and just know what's good for me.
That said, it bears noting that Boiler Room is a guilty pleasure, its high relief pronouncements and hyperventilating performances often proving an entertaining source of diversion. In a curious metaphor, it reduces finance to a sport of mental violence, replete with a locker room animus and an end justifies-the-means nihilism pervading it.
And into this world comes our narrating innocent, Seth, imbued with a naturally magnetic verve by young Mr. Ribisi. Well, he's not really that innocent, which might explain Seth's immediate success at the Stocks R Us "chop shop." The employment is merely the latest in a long string of attempts to please his ever-detracting father, a Federal judge played with icy delicacy ("I'm not your friend. That's your mother's game. I'm your father") by Ron Rifkin.
Just previously, after not being able to find his niche at college, Seth sought ego gratification and commercial success by running a casino out of his apartment. Of course it didn't bode very well with Dad once he got wind of the venture. But strangely, Seth mourns that Dad doesn't recognise his entrepreneurial skills. Okay, so your no-nonsense father is more Mr. Spock than Dr. Spock. But what gives with you, Seth?
In any case, with Seth's new employment things now look like they might, at long last, be improving. That is, until we learn just what kind of a place J.T. Marlin really is. The poor kid just can't catch a break.
While obsession with the accumulation of wealth is hardly a new topic, this variation on the theme does have spirit. Ostensibly, it's a gang that Seth has joined. 'Vanquish the enemy and become a millionaire before you are thirty' is the do-or-die mantra. He has been guaranteed wealth and power; he need only apply himself. More importantly, yet only tacitly implied, he has been promised friendship.
The tentative camaraderie of these latter day lost boys who work for the opulent but naggingly shady J.T. Marlin makes for a strangely antagonistic support system. This includes, but is not limited to, after-work diversions such as beating up stockbrokers from the blue chip firms when detecting their effrontery at a mutual watering hole.
But more telling about this kinship is when they all gather at one of the young millionaire's sparsely decorated but toy-filled manses to watch Wall Street. Reverently treating it like the epic tome of their origin, cheering as their financier-hero (Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko) finesses his stock market swindles, they take turns mouthing dialogue that they have committed to memory -- like a Rocky Horror Picture Show for the latest brave new world.
And to think, just yesterday they were singing along with the characters on Sesame Street. It's a good scene. Problem is, there are more good scenes here than good movie. Borrowing from the Oliver Stone school of high intensity/low substance studies, auteur Younger supplies neither groundbreaking sociology nor the sort of heady connective tissue that might have made Boiler Room explode with truly steaming realism.
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