I’ll admit, it never occurred to me that we might need a female version of all those high-finance dramas that we’ve seen ever since Gordon Gekko told us that greed was good. I didn’t see the need for it until I got a look at Equity. With its brilliantly double-edged title, this financial thriller is good enough to stand with The Big Short and Margin Call and all the other male-dominated best examples of the form.
Late of TV’s Breaking Bad, Anna Gunn stars as Naomi Bishop, a senior investment banker at a Wall Street firm who’s preparing to take a promising tech startup to its IPO. She’s angling to replace her bank’s outgoing global head of acquisitions, but she’s coming off a high-profile failure with her previous IPO and badly needs a win. If that’s not enough pressure, her boyfriend (James Purefoy) who works as a hedge-fund manager at her bank is snooping through her things for information that he uses to conduct illegal insider trading. This catches the attention of a white-collar crime investigator (Alysia Reiner) in the U.S. Attorney’s office, who happens to be an old college friend of Naomi’s. And then a lowly assistant (Sophie von Haselberg) at the tech company tells Naomi that its new social network that prizes users’ privacy can be easily hacked.
This is the second feature film for Meera Menon, a young director of Indian descent, and she plunges us into the world of Wall Street without either dumbing down the material or overwhelming us with jargon. Sexism is never overtly addressed in this movie, but you feel its presence everywhere. Naomi has a smaller margin for error than a male colleague with her track record would, and while no one takes issue with her performance, everyone from her boss (Lee Tergesen) to the tech company’s douchey CEO (Samuel Roukin) makes vague noises about how she rubs people the wrong way. When she protests to the CEO that she’s only being thorough, the Zuckerberg wannabe yells back, “That’s funny! I thought your job was to be inspiring!” Naomi herself is not an innocent, either — while she’s bumping up against the glass ceiling, she’s giving the same treatment to her underpaid, hard-working, newly pregnant VP (Sarah Megan Thomas).
The movie ends with nearly everyone selling out Naomi, and I wish it had all been more satisfying. The conclusion has neither the despairing inevitability of Glengarry Glen Ross (the film or the play) nor the chilling moral ambiguity of A Most Violent Year. Yet it’s shot through with the same sordid desperation as the best movies of its type, and that quality looks different when it’s seen through a woman’s eyes. That makes Equity a valuable thing to have.
[box_info]Equity
Starring Anna Gunn, Sarah Megan Thomas, and Alysia Reiner. Directed by Meera Menon. Written by Amy Fox. Rated R.[/box_info]
