Review: Gold

Gold (15)

USA 2016 121 mins Dir: Stephen Gaghan Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Edgar Ramírez, Bryce Dallas Howard, Toby Kebbell

When a film is advertised as being “based on a too good to be true story” and its opening caption claims it is “inspired by true events”, we’re prepared for a yarn that plays as fast and loose with the facts as such notorious dissemblers as keen Brexiteers or the President of the USA. Oscar winning Traffic writer Stephen Gaghan’s Gold certainly changes names and locations and conflates characters, mostly for legal reasons, but the bare bones of the plot – and many of the outlandish details – really happened. In something of a gift to the filmmakers, it’s a story that’s little known outside Canada. Trouble is that this alone doesn’t make for a great movie. Despite a self-conscious attempt to ape the style and tone of The Wolf of Wall Street and American Hustle, Gold falls rather short, seemingly unable to decide whether it wants to be a caper movie or anti-capitalist satire and ultimately succeeding as neither.

Still, it does have Matthew McConaughey with a pot belly and Johnny Depp’s Black Mass baldy wig chomping up the screen as down-on-his-luck prospector Kenny Wells. Once the golden boy of the small-time but solvent family Washoe Mining Corporation, he lost everything in just seven short years. By 1988, he’s working out of a local bar with his few remaining loyal sidekicks. So Kenny decides to risk the little he has left, together with whatever he can scrape together from gullible investors, on one last, desperate roll of the dice. Old chum geologist Michael Acosta (Edgar Ramírez) once made a huge copper find in Indonesia and theorised that there was an even larger fortune in gold to be found somewhere in the inhospitable jungle. Sure enough, after suffering plenty of hardship and setbacks, the duo hit the mother lode. Now all those Wall Street slickers who treated Kenny like a joke have to eat shit as they scramble for a slice of the biggest find of the century.

Clearly, there’s more to the story than this or it would all be rather dull. A framing device has Kenny being interviewed, initially in voiceover, and we eventually learn the circumstances of this encounter. McConaughey certainly has great fun as the chain-smoking, whisky-guzzling, cocky and garrulous anti-hero, taking every opportunity to expose the ample Method Belly that flops over his Y-fronts. There’s also much knockabout fun had at the expense of Wall Street insiders’ privately expressed disdain for this vulgar interloper and his frightful nouveau riche wife (Bryce Dallas Howard). “It’s like a drunk raccoon got hold of the Hope Diamond,” sniffs Corey Stoll’s devious investment banker.

As a parable about greed, however, Gold is rather less successful, pulling its punches when it could go for the jugular. Instead, plot mechanics eventually yield a lightly foreshadowed twist, though this is more through underchracterisation than misdirection. Indeed, one key player is something of an enigma whose motives remain unclear throughout. The final payoff is also a cheap shot that’s clearly intended to raise a smirk, but doesn’t bear any real scrutiny. That said, we do learn some interesting stuff about the prospecting industry. Who knew that there was a Prospector of the Year award that takes the form of a Golden Pickaxe? Or that there’s a magazine entitled Gold Digger? One can’t help wondering how many ambitious ladies have picked up a copy, only to find that it was not what they expected.