GOLD (Stephen Gaghan). 121 minutes. Opens Friday (January 27). See listing. Rating: NN
I’ll watch Matthew McConaughey in anything – hell, even True Detective – but Gold is a bust.
For his first theatrical feature in a decade, director Stephen Gaghan, who’s been working in television since 2005’s Syriana, tackles nothing less than the dark heart of American capitalism.
It’s the tale of Texas hustler Kenny Wells (McConaughey), who, in 1988, partners with geologist Michael Acosta (Edgar Ramírez) on the hunt for a massive gold deposit in Indonesia, and the financial whirlwind that follows.
Gaghan and screenwriters Patrick Massett and John Zinman are sorta-kinda telling the Bre-X story, which allows them to slap an “inspired by actual events” tag on their movie, but they’ve changed virtually every detail – including the decade in which it took place – to allow for a more dramatic tale of grit and ingenuity.
At least I think that’s why they did it. It might just have been an easier pitch with an American hero, and situating the story in the era of Reagan/Bush rather than Clinton makes the Wall Street jokes land a little easier – not that any of that financial heedlessness exactly stopped in the 90s.
McConaughey’s pop-eyed determination can’t paper over clumsy storytelling, slack pacing and a one-dimensional depiction of everyone except Kenny. Bryce Dallas Howard is wasted as Kenny’s long-suffering partner, and Macon Blair – a knockout in Blue Ruin and Green Room – appears in the background as a co-worker of Kenny’s just often enough that I wondered why Gaghan bothered to cast him if he wasn’t going to give him anything to do.
Yes, it’s fun to see McConaughey stride around as a wheeler-dealer who could be the less successful brother of his Wolf Of Wall Street philosopher king. But the movie around him doesn’t measure up.
