Gold
Directed by: Stephen Gaghan
Written by: Patrick Massett & John Zinman
Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Edgar Ramirez, Bryce Dallas Howard, Adam LeFevre, Joshua Harto, Tony Kebbell, Corey Stoll, Stacy Keach, Stafford Douglas, Frank Wood, Rachael Taylor, Bruce Greenwood, Bhavesh Patel, Michael Landes, Timothy Simons, Craig T. Nelson
Adventure/Drama/Thriller - 121 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 27 Jan 2017
Written by: Patrick Massett & John Zinman
Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Edgar Ramirez, Bryce Dallas Howard, Adam LeFevre, Joshua Harto, Tony Kebbell, Corey Stoll, Stacy Keach, Stafford Douglas, Frank Wood, Rachael Taylor, Bruce Greenwood, Bhavesh Patel, Michael Landes, Timothy Simons, Craig T. Nelson
Adventure/Drama/Thriller - 121 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 27 Jan 2017
If a film offers up gold as its centerpiece, audiences are conditioned to conjure up Treasure of the Sierra Madre paranoia. Stephen Gaghan’s Gold bypasses the paranoid feelings that someone is going to steal your nuggets and points fingers at the Wall Street sharks who will swoop down and snatch it from you. The market chiefs may not even have to fight too hard to get their slice because the men who stumbled upon and are offering stakes in the goldmine are more Wolf of Wall Street penny stock hucksters than down to Earth prospectors. Relying too heavily on the familiar plot sine wave of started from the bottom to made it to the top of the world to back on the street again ebb and flow, Gaghan’s Gold drags under too much plot and an antihero the audience couldn't care less about.
Kenny Wells (Matthew McConaughey, Kubo and the Two Strings) is a bottom barrel mining prospector operating out of a bar during the day to keep overhead costs down. Feeling pretty good in 1981 when we first meet him, Wells dazzles his girlfriend, Kay (Bryce Dallas Howard, Pete's Dragon) about how he is the money man who arrives with money and contracts whenever an on the nose geologist scores a find. Low level commodities are all well and good, but gold, that gets everyone’s attention. Whether or not it was a commodity recession or sheer ineptitude, the next time we meet Kenny in 1988, he’s gained massive weight, covers his bald head with the world’s most unconvincing combover, and he’s stealing his wife’s jewelry for one last golden Hail Mary.
Kenny Wells (Matthew McConaughey, Kubo and the Two Strings) is a bottom barrel mining prospector operating out of a bar during the day to keep overhead costs down. Feeling pretty good in 1981 when we first meet him, Wells dazzles his girlfriend, Kay (Bryce Dallas Howard, Pete's Dragon) about how he is the money man who arrives with money and contracts whenever an on the nose geologist scores a find. Low level commodities are all well and good, but gold, that gets everyone’s attention. Whether or not it was a commodity recession or sheer ineptitude, the next time we meet Kenny in 1988, he’s gained massive weight, covers his bald head with the world’s most unconvincing combover, and he’s stealing his wife’s jewelry for one last golden Hail Mary.
Michael Acosta (Edgar Ramírez, The Girl on the Train) is a has been mineral finder bumming around Indonesia, just the kind of down on his luck, remembers the good old days, kind of guy Kenny is looking for. The two trek into Indonesia’s backcountry through a couple long shots to show us how off the beaten path they are, and start digging holes. Kenny misses most of the discovery period suffering through a malarial haze, but Acosta is right there with the good news when he pulls out of it; they’ve got a goldmine. Kenny, who spends an awful lot of time hanging out in his tightie-whities, jumps straight into Acosta’s arms as they are already mentally spending the money before the first check comes in.
Around this time, Kenny switches into voiceover mode as if he’s talking to a therapist about what it feels like to hit gold and how suddenly his name was on everyone’s lips; the same lips he couldn’t get a return phone call from just a few weeks ago. Kenny was already talking to us through voiceover earlier, but who he turns out to be talking to is one of the film’s surprises. Granted, given the conventional story arc and how we all know his hubris and alcoholism will lead to a crushing downfall, even if we don’t already know the ‘Based on a True Story' facts, the recipient of the voiceover is no shock at all.
The therapist feeling smells so strong because Kenny believes in his dreams. On a particular drunken night, he dreams about Indonesia which is why he digs up Acosta. When Kenny yells at bankers and lawyers he accuses of trying to steal from him, he refers to himself as a man who follows his dreams no matter where they lead. He repeatedly holds up his hands as tools which have dug in the dirt, whose fingernails have dirt underneath them, and mocks corporate board members who have never left the conference table to toil in the soil. The ‘let’s proven ‘em wrong’ motivation Kenny stirs up with Acosta results from dreams, but the whole enterprise is far too predictable and plastic for audiences who have seen all of this trial and error business before.
Tucked away in all of this is Kay, Kenny’s wife. She loved Kenny when he was fat and drunk with no prospects. Now that there are billions to be made, Kay is suspicious of the fancy suits and fake tits orbiting Kenny who does not have the faculties to realize Kay is his bedrock, not the starry-eyed leeches. Kenny confuses Kay’s loyalty and happiness with their old life as backwoods ignorance. Once again, we circle back to shades of The Wolf of Wall Street. DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort threw over his loyal first wife once he had the opportunity to snort cocaine out of a hooker’s ass.
The repetitive montages Gaghan keeps throwing in showing the thrill of pulling ore out of the ground and flying in helicopters to Wall Street meetings are so obvious they are more to be endured than enjoyed. Gold is an odd film for Stephen Gaghan to make. We expect a much sharper product from the man who wrote Traffic (2000) and directed Syriana (2005). Co-writers Patrick Massett and John Zinman, who have Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and some Friday Night Lights TV episodes to their names, lead us on a languid paint by numbers adventure we can predict a mile away. McConaughey delivers another high-caliber performance which outshines the material by an order of magnitude. It’s shocking to see him with a bulging gut and terrible teeth after seeing his ribs in Dallas Buyer’s Club. Gold has the feeling that The Weinstein Company thought it was award-worthy on paper, hence the Gaghan and McConaughey hirings, but you can tell they think the same things the audience does about predictability and boredom since they’re sneaking it out to theaters in the late-January doldrums.
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