Equity

Meera Menon's Equity -- billed as the "first female-driven Wall Street movie" -- sounds like a novelty.

Maybe not quite as gimmicky as the all-little person The Terror of Tiny Town or the all-child Bugsy Malone, but a film that nonetheless depends upon its casting. Specifically it is billed as a female-centric financial thriller, along the lines of Oliver Stone's Wall Street or the Showtime series Billions. It was the opening film at this year's Bentonville Film Festival, and the year before the festival had hosted a panel in which the premise for the movie was discussed. During that panel, someone said something that led me to believe the film took place in an alternate reality almost completely devoid of men. And, as much as that might improve the world, it seemed like an unpromising premise.

So it's a delightful surprise to discover the finished film is a smart and stylish corporate thriller driven by a really terrific performance by Anna Gunn (Breaking Bad, Deadwood) as Naomi Bishop, a steely investment banker who recalls both Gordon Gekko and Frito (Dax Shepard's character from Idiocracy, with whom she shares the catch-phrase "I like money"). And while one may be tempted to say that Equity is more enjoyable than it is accomplished, the truth is I'm not sure it isn't a better, or at least less overt, movie than Stone's Wall Street. It disguises a modest budget well; it whips along at a good pace, and the story it tells is -- in this post-Snowden, Mr. Robot age -- entirely plausible.

But the plot -- about the public launch of a privacy-focused social media site called Cachet -- is really incidental to the thematic thrust of the piece, which is that sisters are doing it for themselves. By the time the story opens, the bootstrapping Naomi (she grew up poor and appreciates the power and freedom money allows) has already been knocked down, scapegoated for the lukewarm reception of a single IPO amid a portfolio of stock successes.

"It's not your year," her male superior tells her, and from her face we understand that it's not the first time she has heard the line. And Naomi's failure is multiplied when she has to deny her assistant Erin (Sarah Megan Thomas, also one of the film's producers) a promotion. It seems like these girls never get a break.

But Naomi sees Cachet, the brainchild of a British tech wunderkind (Samuel Roukin), as her comeback play. But there are problems with the deal -- rumors of security breaches threaten to weaken the stock. Naomi doesn't know whom to trust; and the situation is complicated by the re-emergence of her old college pal Samantha (Alysia Reiner, Orange Is the New Black, another of the film's producers) a federal agent who has recently given up drug busts for investigating financial corruption. And, as luck would have it, Samantha's latest target is a hedge-fund manager named Michael Connor (James Purefoy), who just happens to be Naomi's sometime lover.

In the end, the personal politics are more interesting than the financial shenanigans, which might lead some to conclude that Equity is just another dressed-up soap opera. And it is that, albeit one that provides its actors with more than a couple of juicy scenes. Visually, Menon opts for grit over sleekness, suggesting the animalistic nature that moves beneath all the fine tailoring. Combined with Gunn's dynamic, amoral Naomi, this invests the movie -- which otherwise might have been dismissed as an exercise in material wishfulness or a feminist screed -- with a genuine point.

MovieStyle on 09/02/2016