Gold

And My Worst Recurring Nightmare In Prison

I went to prison at the start of the McConaissance as it were. I was eager to see “Interstellar”, and I ended up catching it in prison. I have my feelings about it – very mixed – but I couldn’t deny the effect of Matthew McConaughey as America’s Dad, or maybe Earth’s Dad. Seems like he was primed for a big moment. And for the sake of this FAILED OSCAR BAIT week, it’s interesting that he jumped into a number of movies that sounded a lot like theoretical Oscar vehicles.

In 2015 alone, there was “Free State Of Jones” and “Sea Of Trees”, neither of which made a ripple. There was voicework in “Kubo And The Two Strings”, which didn’t connect with many beyond its animated movie base. And then there was the big swing – the true story “Gold”, where McConaughey would go bald and get in a fat suit for a historical epic. Oscar voters typically LOVE that.

In “Gold”, McConaughey’s white savior of the week is Kenny Wells, a once-promising nepobaby who squanders his father’s wealth – Dad is played by legendary disapproving Dad Craig T. Nelson, one of many signs of how little imagination was used in casting this because there is nothing genetically shared between these two actors. Wells is a prospector for Washoe, and he’s driven business down so much he’s now leading the company from a bar, drunkenly taking daytime phone calls and pretty much on the verge of quitting. Whether that means the business or his own life seems up for debate, but given how much he feels he’s let his father down, they may be the same.

His girlfriend, again a dubious choice, is Bryce Dallas Howard. Look, I like Howard. She seems like a total sweetheart. And obviously, she’s beautiful. We watched “Jurassic World” many times while I was in prison, and while I was decidedly not fond of the movie, I still mooned over how much she sweat during that movie, a thought that made incarcerated nights easier to endure. But as a performer, she has but one register at a time. I’ve seen too many movies where she loudly voices her character’s interests, and then sits there, translucent, as the plot happens around her. Here, she’s meant to be Wells’ love, but her plot purpose is to nag him and remind the audience that he is a bum. And then, inexplicably, to stick around. It’s a lousy role, an unflattering depiction of a real person, and Howard doesn’t find any hidden depth in this part whatsoever.

But this movie is not about her, it’s a two-hander with Edgar Ramirez, at a time where Hollywood had no idea what to do with him so they arbitrarily placed him wherever they liked. As Michael Acosta, he is Wells’ connect. There’s gold in those hills, specifically Indonesia, and Acosta can use Wells’ resources and connections to find it. Acosta’s seductive promise is meant to make Wells into a dupe who would buy anything from this smooth operator. But the direction, from Stephen Gaghan, has no flavor, and no interest in anything beyond a common two-shot in depicting conversations and relationships. “Gold” goes from bars to the jungle and back to the boardrooms of America, with no interesting visuals to show for it.

“Gold” thus becomes an adventure where the adventurer is a rich white guy with nothing material at stake. Gaghan overcompensates for this lack of dramatic stakes by turning it into “Wolf Of Wall Street”, which, hey, wasn’t McConaughey in that? A late-film episode involving Wells and a live tiger – unconvincingly played by special effects and maybe some compositing – reminds you of how algorithmic these supposed Oscar movies actually can be. Gaghan doesn’t have the good taste to break from this tired story structure, but he also lacks the bad taste of Scorsese to let Wells do what Jordan Belfort did. Obviously, they’re different characters, so that may be unfair. But a little more reckless behavior would go a long way towards making Wells interesting.

McConaughey is always worth watching, even when his acting choices are suspect, and even when his taste in material is lacking – he followed this movie with the awful franchise-killer “The Dark Tower” and really-this-movie-is-insane “Serenity”. He leans on the new physicality of his gut and his phony baldness as props, creating a caricature not unlike his notable “Tropic Thunder” co-star Tom Cruise as Les Grossman. McConaughey sees the vulgarity in this guy even if Gaghan doesn’t, and he goes over-the-top in his body language as a businessman desperately trying to control something he cannot. “Gold” becomes a morality tale as Wells is besieged by the law on the right and dignity on the left, but the lack of dramatic momentum makes the third-act revelations feel like they can be played in any order and work exactly the same. The only way I could discern passage of time in this movie was by the size of Wells’ gut. If I’m watching the lead character’s tummy during a movie, and it’s not a Cronenberg-style body horror picture, then I have to question if this film is working.

It makes sense for a production company to bet on Gaghan as an Oscar-caliber filmmaker, as he won a little gold man for Best Adapted Screenplay for “Traffic”. As a director, he had previously shepherded “Syriana” to Oscar attention back in 2006, though he hadn’t been involved in a movie for nearly a decade before being hired for “Gold”. This was a Weinstein movie, which meant Oscar aspirations were a part of the entire deal, but when the movie faded at the box office, the movie’s Oscar hopes vanished. Ultimately, the movie received a single Golden Globe nomination only, for Best Original Song. This movie had a title track by Iggy Pop!

Now, there is a personal story I want to tell, and I want you to indulge me, because it sounds stupid and ridiculous. It comes to mind because Gaghan rebounded from “Gold” with an unlikely choice, the children’s film “Dolittle”. “Dolittle” was released in 2020, right before the pandemic hit. But it was a movie that gave me nightmares as early as 2016, before I even knew it was being made. Please understand I am not being hyperbolic – I lived in a horrible place, among killers and rapists, under armed guards, within institutions designed to break me. And the worst recurring nightmare I had while I was in prison involved “Dolittle”.

Early in my sentence, with the full knowledge of its length, I began to have abstract dreams of how it would end. It didn’t feel like it was a realistic expectation, it felt like I would leave prison and enter an unrecognizable future with bizarre technology, eccentric accepted public behavior, and illegible popular culture. In the dream, an unseen friend would take me straight from prison to the movies. I would be so excited, but when I arrived, I would not recognize any of the titles on the marquee. So I would tell my companion, I trust you, pick something, whatever is popular, I don’t care.

We would enter the theater and sit in our seats, which felt like thrones. The movie would begin, and these massive chairs would begin to shake and vibrate, elevating into the air. We’d feel mists of hot air and smoke coming from the vents. Yes, this is basically a 4DX presentation, which was around before I went to prison, but in the nightmare this was new technology, immediately delivering a sharp headache. Somehow, I became aware that this was a movie where Robert Downey Jr. would talk to a variety of computer-generated tropical animals, in front of a series of increasingly-unconvincing CGI backgrounds.

A fake helicopter shot would allow us to descend on an island that was entirely digital, not at all physical. There, the music starts – oh god, it’s a musical. Out walks Emily Blunt, in a bikini entirely-inappropriate for a children’s film. She turns to the camera, and she is wearing a bindi on her forehead, because white people have decided that nothing matters anymore. She sings to cartoon animals that circle her and at no point share the same physical space. Her eyeline doesn’t match anything. The camera lingers lasciviously, disgustingly, over her figure, in ways I’ve never seen before in a children’s film. And the hot air keeps hitting the side of my face. I press my fingers to my temple. I turn to ask my friend, “Are all movies like this now?” And he turns to me, dispassionately, and says, “Yeah.” And then, in prison, I wake up in a cold sweat. Over and over again.