boiler room (2000) review
For many of us in the MTV-when-it-had-music-videos generation, Boiler Room (2000) is the turn of the millennium boilerplate for a life of excess that seemed pretty darn appealing. The film stars Giovanni Ribisi in an understatedly nuanced performance that sees his character transition from well-intentioned to willfully ignorant/exploitative and back again. His journey from running a comparatively tame but still illegal home casino to superstar broker of imaginary stock at imaginary firm JT Marlin (imaginary both literally and within the film) is a prescient cautionary tale for the dangers of sacrificing one’s identity in pursuit of the almighty dollar. The film’s impressive cast of early-career stars including Ben Affleck, Scott Caan, Vin Diesel and Tom Everett Scott present a dramatized but fully steeped in fact account of how the stock market and its unintelligible rules and regulations can be manipulated for ill-gotten gain. Boiler Room is a proto-Wolf of Wall Street. Both films are magnetic from start to finish and present Wall Street as a den of greedy amoral thieves. The key difference is while Jordan Belfort was a relentless con-artist and unlikable to anyone not getting rich with him, Ribisi’s Seth Davis is inherently good and flirts with the ultimate seducer (money) without ever allowing himself to fully turn to the dark side save for a brief moment at the peak of his scam-artist skill as a JT Marlin pump and dump broker. You can clearly see the pain and anguish on Ribisi’s increasingly pallid and lizard like face as he bilks his “customers” out of their life savings. I would argue that Ribisi’s character always knew that no amount of money is worth the destruction of the hopes and dreams of another. If not, he learned a valuable and timely lesson.
Boiler Room receives a score of 9.5/10 for general audiences and for fans of stellar acting and writing. The scenes with Affleck are worth the price of admission.