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USA 2016
Directed by
Stephen Gaghan
121 minutes
Rated M

Reviewed by
Bernard Hemingway
4 stars

Gold

Synopsis: Kenny Wells (Matthew McConaughey) a third generation CEO  of a family mining company on its druthers makes one last tilt at striking it rich and finds out that all that glisters is not gold.

Stephen Gaghan’s film was released last week in the US to a generally negative response and did not do well in Aistralia but it is hard to see why.  With a tautly-paced roller-coaster ride story of wanton ambition and cruel deception, a quality production design and an outstanding performance by Matthew McConaughey it is for my money a better addition to the catalogue of American-Dream-gone-wrong film than was Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf Of Wall Street (2013) to which it is thematically and factually related insofar as both deal with stock market manipulations and the pursuit of unearned wealth.  

Gold is inspired, loosely it seems, by real-life events involving a Canadian mining company, Bre-X , which in the early ‘90s claimed to have discovered a major gold deposit in Indonesia.  It went public on the Toronto stock exchange and in a feeding frenzy of cupidity soared before it was discovered to have faked its assay results.  The company disappeared overnight taking with it billions of dollars of private investor money

Gold is, of course the primary symbol of man’s greed and Gold is a rip-roaring story of exactly that, combining a good old fashioned adventure yarn about the prospector spirit with yet another real-life story of stock-market boom-and-bust speculation. Unlike Scorsese’s film, however, Gold has at its heart a strong emotional drive in the form of Kenny Wells, a man who has grown up in the shadows of his father and the legends of prospecting lore and who yearns to add his name to the roll-call and thus, as Terry Malloy put it, “be somebody”.

In many ways a brother to Christian Bale’s Irving Rosenfeld in 2013's American Hustle (at one stage Bale was slated for the Wells role with Michael Mann directing) with his paunch, sparse hair and permanently sweating skin Kenny’s appearance is unprepossessing yet his unbridled enthusiasm is strangely compelling.  The fact that it is the only real asset that he has imbues him with a kind of attention-grabbing desperation that makes him a great lead character and McConaughey brings him alive with a mixture of brash over-confidence and neediness that earns our sympathy. Kenny is a loser you really want to win, a kind of wilder, booze-sozzled, BO-exuding variant of Ray Kroc, the far-less charismatic real-life subject of The Founder.

Which brings us the film’s sole but considerable miscalculation - its ending.  Internally it doesn’t gel with the way in which Kenny has been presented - which is as an essentially good-natured, generous guy with no real concern for money for its own sake. Externally, given that the real-life Bre-X directors, whilst proclaiming innocence absconded to the Cayman Islands, it doesn’t do justice to its “true story” claims but rather betrays them with a standard-issue feel-good ending.

Significant as this is, it only constitutes a small percentage of the running time and with, in addition to those things already mentioned strong support from Édgar Ramírez and Bryce Dallas Howard along with Robert Elswit’s pellucid cinematography in terms of entertainment value Gold is a sorely under-rated movie, at least for anyone who enjoys tales of flawed humanity.

 

 

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