Gay Today: Entertainment

Boiler Room

Film Review
by Warren D. Adkins

Over twenty years ago I learned a lesson about the mindsets of many of my fellow Americans that came as something of a surprise. I was seated at a corporate table with fellow employees when the moderator asked us our favorite pastimes.

Giovanni Ribisi stars
in Boiler Room

Several co-workers shocked me by replying "shopping," without even a hint of embarrassment. While I may have had previous intimations that there were folks who actually enjoyed the process of buying things, a process which had always seemed mundane to me, hearing people I knew call it their "favorite pastime" unsettled me far more, somehow, than if they'd simply admitted to a liking for group masturbation instead.

I'd little way to know then how greedy Reaganites had already come into vogue, how they'd left 1960s values like empathy, ecstasy and energy in the dust. A new generation of brainwashed materialists had been created, celebrating money, Mercedes and mansions. My co-workers, a bunch of consumer boomers, were waiting eagerly to what? To buy. Shopping had become their most satisfying pursuit.

The pendulum's now swinging again—after a score of years—so that it's once again possible for artists—particularly filmmakers like Ben Younger-- to unmask such mindless consumerism and to look closely at the grotesque materialistic meatheads behind it.

Boiler Room provides a peek into a crass world of "stockjocks" where young men make fortunes on the sorry backs of those who love to shop. Peddling stocks—by phone—these Generation Xers gyp unsuspecting consumers out of their life's savings, becoming soulless hardsellers so as to buy an unlimited supply of luxury toys for themselves.

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The film begins as Seth Davis (Giovanni Ribisi)—a college drop out—joins a brokerage firm whose sales force comprises fast-talking, ego-involved, post-teen millionaires utilizing their gifts of gab to bilk boneheaded investors, selling them unwanted and useless shares.

Ben Affleck is the firm's chief recruiter. Affleck's talent as an actor and his propensity to accept roles that are also cultural exposes, have been put to good use in Boiler Room. Other Boiler Room inmates include the rich, fast-talking Chris (Vin Diesel), and Greg (Nicky Katt), whose personae is pushy and who is jealous of newcomer Seth's success rate. Boiler Room's male cast feeds on the "lets get something for almost nothing" greed of wanna-be investors.

Seth observes how his co-workers wickedly prosper while their customers do not. He ignites a Federal investigation that heats up the Boiler Room, threatening his relationships with everyone he knows, including his own dad (Ron Rifkin).

Scott Caan plays Richie

This film exposes the intersections of America's most pretentious practices and cults.

Success: How it must be seen to be believed. It is not an inner content that makes riches relevant, but but what can be purchased—like the stockjocks' Ferraris and mansions. What is behind these glittering surfaces—whether nobility or nastiness—is irrelevant to them. Success, for them, can only be apparent through their acquisitions.

Efficiency and Service: There's a mechanical quality about America's Boiler Room cults of power. Values, such as they are, are conceived as working externally and for some particular end related to success. Efficiency, in this Boiler Room culture, isn't the product of inner work that one does on oneself or within others, nor are Boiler Room whippersnappers "of service" because they hope to help lift an ailing humanity to some better level. No, their "service" is seen as particularly hideous because they wield power based on their deliberate and hypocritical efforts to deceive.

Produced by Suzanne and Jennifer Todd, Boiler Room is a Team Todd production for New Line Cinema.