"Boiler Room" a sign-of-the-times film. It captures the essence of today, where it seems like we're living in an era of incredible wealth creation and economic largesse, where it seems like dozens of 'paper' billionaires are created every month, where it seems like marginal pro athletes and modestly talented pop artists routinely pull down contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars, where it seems like Microsoft secretaries can retire after their stock options vest in five years, and where everyone, but you, seems to be making a killing in the longest stock market bull run in memory ... this is the psychic backdrop for "Boiler Room." Greed, for lack of a better word, seems good. Greed seems to work. Greed seems right.
But, I know not seems. "Boiler Room" offers a little more insight on life than just money matters.
Seth Davis, about 19 years old, is a bright kid. School just isn't his bag, and when we meet him, he's just dropped out of Queens College, which would be in the Queens borough of New York City. To make ends meet, he runs a wildly successful and well-organized casino out of his apartment for the local college kids. But it's a business just waiting for an indictment.
Seth wants just two things out of life: to become a millionaire and to be loved by his stern, disapproving father. Of course, running an illegal business, when your father is a federal judge, is probably the wrong approach to parental approval. In his quest for wealth, Seth nearly shatters all chances for paternal love. Over the course of the movie, he finds himself back at square one: craving money and needing fatherly love. I'm not sure what kind of movie this really is, but there's something quintessentially American about Seth's aspirations. They're simple desires, almost childlike and innocent, but they are pure, accessible, and perhaps even universal.
Since his father doesn't approve of the casino business, which, Seth comes to reflect upon, might have been the best thing he's ever done -- he says, 'I looked my customers in the eye, and I provided a service they wanted ...' -- he searches for another way to succeed legitimately. And so, he learns about -- actually he's recruited by one of his older casino patrons to -- a stockbroking firm called JT Marlin. While the name sounds credible -- compare it to Bear Stearns, Lazard Freres, Goldman Sachs, for instance -- even on his first day, Seth has microscopic doubts, wondering why this company, with all the outward trappings of a real Wall Street firm, has its offices way out on Long Island, an hour away from the real action. To make money in this game, all he'll need is a telephone and a slick-assed sales pitch designed to grift money from the fingers of greedy, but grossly under-informed stock buyers. I don't want to talk too much about the particulars of the story, because the narrative line is rather lean, but suffice it to say, Seth's doubts eventually grow into full-blown cancers that he cannot ignore.
There are some excellent performances, especially turned in by Seth (played by Giovanni Ribisi), his father (Ron Rifkin), Greg (Nicky Katt) the suave, slick pretty boy who introduces Seth into the world of the "chop shop" stock broker and who drives a Ferrari, an ugly yellow Ferrari (duh!), and Nia Long as Abby, the secretary who makes $80,000 a year, knows the firm is crooked, but looks the other way because she has a sick mother to care for. She and Seth form a surprisingly believable love relationship that comes to a rather sad conclusion. Ingenue du jour, Ben Affleck, also makes an appearance as the top dog holler guy, and he gets to mouth lines like: "I am a millionaire. That's sounds funny to say," and, "Anyone who says that money is the root of all evil doesn't have any."
I'm probably not the first to point out that "Boiler Room" is a new millenium update to Oliver Stone's 1985 film, "Wall Street," but one of the JT Marlin brokers, Chris, played by ham-handed actor Vin Diesel, quotes Michael Douglas's Gordon Gekko line-for-line as a group gathers around the TV watching the movie on videotape. (I guess you call that "art imitating art.") Beneath the surface, the key similarity between the two films centers around the relationship of fathers and sons. Both films make the point that fathers desperately want to be proud of their sons. But they want their sons to be honorable, and perhaps better men than they are themselves ... in a world more pathological than ever before. I for one, believe that it takes more to make a great man today than it took to make three great men 100 years ago.
In the turning point of "Boiler Room," we get a very moving depiction of a son who finally figures out how to do right by his dad, and perhaps begin the process of becoming a better man. If you are male, and you've found yourself trying to live up to high, perhaps lofty hopes of your father, then you'll find a lot to consider in this film.
In the end, it's not about money. It is about love.
Crime Drama DVD - Ben Younger's Boiler Room is a morality tale about sleazy stockbrokers that freely acknowledges its antecedents: The film's young, w...More at Barnes and Noble
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