The interplay between Roberts and Clooney, who have the chemistry on-screen of old friends, is fun, and Foster handles the many plot strands of the film competently but without much distinction. And like all good satires, it never feels out of place, because the world we live in is already full of them.
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“Money Monster”, Foster’s fourth film as a director, debuted in Cannes on Thursday ahead of its North American release on Friday. Julia Roberts co-stars as Patty Fenn, Gates’ long-time director who realizes that Budwell might have a point.
Gates is the glib host of Money Monster, an investment advice show on the mythical FNN Network.
Clooney and O’Connell together offer an unforeseen but welcome buddy-movie spark when Lee and Kyle find their relationship turned on its head in the movie’s second half (which nearly makes up for a meandering first part). She has one of the best laughs in Hollywood and it has been a while since she showed it off. Clooney is something of an arrogant jerk, Roberts (miraculously) comes across as a relatively normal human being, and filming for the day’s episode seems to be going relatively smoothly.
However, Money Monster eventually doesn’t turn out to be about the bad capitalists after all, even though Occupy Wall Street too gets thrown at Gates.
“That really was, even though I had been an actor for quite a while and had made many movies, that really was the beginning of my life as an actor”. He is to this film what Leslie Nielsen was the Zucker/Abrahams comedies, and Roberts functions well as his exasperated straight-woman.
The world is so insane that it’s tough for social satirists to devise anything more absurd than what we see in our daily news reports.
That being said, Foster has crafted a strong thriller here (with a few really neat surprises including a twist about Budwell’s girlfriend) but the movie also tackles larger subjects in a compelling way. [She] goes and travels through this forest of experience and meets gnomes and demons along the way, and then is changed by that, and is able to come back to her people and bring the magic panacea – that’s a real classic structure, and that’s always been reserved for men, at least in film.
“People I think should have been saying, ‘Do you mean the 1.5 billion people around the world who fit that description, do you mean the people who are USA citizens, who are members of the military, the vast majority of whom are not extremist or violent in any way?'” Amal Clooney asked. “I thought that was well within my capabilities”. Her greatest success lies in the studio scenes as Budwell faces the risky consequences of his actions, Gates is forced to reckon with his own antics and Fenn is forced to start asking questions about her show’s content.
She described the difficulty in placing trust in a first-time director, and placing the vision of a multi-million-dollar film in their hands. And I said to her: Would you say that to Francis Ford Coppola?
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Foster was asked about the perception that audiences don’t want to see movies about women. And it’s a full expression of who I am and what I think.
