Commonweal: BAD BOYS - 'Boiler Room' & 'Boys Don't Cry'. - Review

In my mid-twenties I lived briefly in Manhattan. I was trying to write fiction, and after working all morning I'd reward myself by going to a movie. I haunted the revival houses, gorging on European films and Hollywood classics: Closely Watched Trains at the lovely Carnegie Hall Cinema, Night of the Hunter at Theater 80 Saint Mark's, and Citizen Kane at my favorite, the Thalia, where the seats sloped upward toward the screen. A luxurious thing, to dream away an afternoon in the dark; a New York thing. It was as if the city existed to make moviegoing possible.

The only drawback was that afterward there was no one to talk to. Eavesdropping on my way out, I'd catch snatches of people's reactions- somebody trashing a film I'd liked, or exuding enthusiasm over something so palpably sentimental, so deeply flawed, it was all I could do to keep from lunging into their conversation. Instead, New Yorker in hand, I'd head for the nearest park bench to check my take on the film against Pauline Kael's. For me as for so many others, Kael was the ideal reviewer, her literariness played off against a healthy appetite for pop culture, her manner imperious but informal. Her reviews read like someone talking; you could argue with her.

Movies are intimate, and like all lovers, the lover of movies luxuriates in the talk afterward. You have a feeling about what you've seen-attraction or resistance, suspicion or joy-and now this feeling is going to be teased out into an idea. So, you ask, what did you think? A reviewer is someone who's there when the lights go up. His is the art of keeping the conversation going.

In Boiler Room, director Ben Younger's debut film about shady dealings in a fly-by-night New York brokerage firm, conversation is less an art than an assault. The movie follows a team of trainees learning the ins and outs of cold-calling, phoning potential investors and trying to hard-sell them stock on the spot. At J.T. Marlin, raucous disdain for clients is the rule-everyone listens in when a broker lands a big fish- and the locker-room atmosphere ripples with sexual/anatomical bluster and the gloating misogyny of refusing to sell stocks to women, or "pitch the bitch." The "senior" brokers, themselves all under thirty, dangle promises of pricey cars and big houses, and preach a casual contempt for anyone not pumped enough to prevail in the adrenaline society. "You want vacation time?" taunts the head recruiter, played by Ben Affleck. "Then go teach third grade in a public school!"

This is territory already well worked by Wall Street and Glengarry Glen Ross, and at first Boiler Room seems like nothing new. But it's Younger's shrewd insight to install a certain tiredness at the heart of his film. If Affleck's tirades sound like lines you've heard before, it's because they are. He quotes from Glengarry Glen Ross to his recruits; and after work, when the gang kicks back with beer and a video, it's Oliver Stone's Wall Street they watch-performing Gordon Gekko's "greed is good" soliloquy verbatim in a rowdy group karaoke.

What's new about this, in other words, is how old it is. Younger's babyfaced trainees have lived their whole lives within the bull-market mythos of greed is good; it's axiomatic, a given. Where Gekko's outburst came off as a blast of evil, with all the classical echoes of lust for power, Boiler Room portrays greed sunk to a petty narcissism: it isn't even real power these stock jocks are after, just the trappings. They're gambling junkies turned scam artists in neckties, and their true affinity is less with the buttoned-down Gekko than with the gangsta rappers whose hip-hop music juices the film's soundtrack. This is low-echelon, trickle-down greed, with no grandeur to it at all. Just another quick high-selling stocks, "the white boy way of slinging crack rock."

Boiler Room sets out to resurrect a sense of evil from this dreary setup. Its hero is Seth Davis (Giovanni Ribisi), a savvy college drop- out who at the film's outset is running an illegal mini-casino in his apartment in Queens. Conflict looms in the form of his father, a New York City judge, played with icy scorn by Ron Rifkin. "Clean up your life," he chastises Seth, "make an honest living." When fate brings to Seth's blackjack game a silky-smooth, Ferrari-driving broker from J.T. Marlin (Nicky Kat), Seth sees a chance and takes it: he'll get a real job, rescue his relationship with dad, and become a player all at once.

Alas, J.T. Marlin turns out to be a less honest business than his casino; and Seth knows it. Boiler Room offers an edgy meditation on intelligence and the moral stakes of everyday life. Seth quickly grasps the sleaziness in pushing dubious stocks to gullible rubes; but that same intelligence also makes him good at it. Among the trainees, he's the star. "Do you know how good it feels to close someone, to sell someone?" he asks in a voice-over; and watching him pitch a nervous client (he plays it beautifully), you can't help sharing his excited pleasure in his own prowess.

Younger understands that what's most interesting about moral obligations-and most dramatic-is our attempts to evade them. From the start Seth knows something isn't adding up at J.T. Marlin. How do the senior brokers earn such big commissions? Why does the firm's compliance officer spend late nights shredding documents? Seth tries his best to hide behind a shield of ignorance, but he can't stand not knowing how the firm actually makes its money, and begins to snoop around. As he zeroes in on the fraud at the core of the firm (it involves selling stocks in phony front companies), he grows increasingly troubled.

Giovanni Ribisi's fascinating face, pale and mournfully brooding-he looks like a silent-film actor-makes Seth a study in tormented introspection. Something has to give. Younger's flashy, redemptive ending serves up a last-ditch chance for Seth to "do one thing right," and in the process delivers a surprisingly hopeful tilt on morality in our age of greed through a coy reversal of the common folk wisdom. In Boiler Room, curiosity may be the only way to save the cat-if the cat is your soul, that is.

To see how a superb performance can rocket a young actress from obscurity into a high-orbit career, check out Hilary Swank's Oscar- grabbing work in Boys Don't Cry. First-time director Kimberly Peirce tells the true-story account of Teena Brandon, a sexually confused young woman who cut her hair, switched first and last names, and passed herself off as a man in a hardscrabble Nebraska town, only to be brutalized by two of her low-life buddies when they found out. Peirce's vision of this rural dystopia is so wholly bleak, with a male element so unremittingly vicious, that it's hard to imagine Brandon ever wanting to join in; but as she riskily falls in love with the ex- girlfriend of one of the thugs, exhilaration blinds her to all danger, and events grind toward tragedy. Shrewdly Peirce keeps scenes of Brandon's undressing shielded, building curiosity; and when the nasties finally turn on Brandon, tearing her clothes off while forcing the girlfriend to watch, it's a profoundly disturbing moment-a savage reduction to the facts of gender, in which your own urge to pin her down feels queasily like complicity.

Perhaps inevitably, the film idealizes Brandon; but Swank shines nonetheless, conveying gentleness and a doomed, breathless joy. Her Brandon is shy but ardent, and ultimately tenacious in pursuit-and then defense-of who she believes herself to be. As her story begins to fall apart, she alters it piece by piece, frantically trying to keep alive a hope for love. Rarely have so many lies come off as so much truth.

Rand Richards Cooper is the author of The Last to Go and Big as Life.