Directed by: Stephen Gaghan
Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Edgar Ramirez, Bryce Dallas Howard, Corey Stoll, Bruce Greenwood, Craig T. Nelson
Gold is passably enjoyable, with Matthew McConaughey diving headlong into near total physical transformation mode as Kenny Wells, a down and out prospector who strikes gold in the Indonesian jungle. Wells is not pleasant to look at. With a thinning hairline, crooked teeth, and a paunch so pronounced we figure Kenny is due to give birth any second now, we assume McConaughey was playing a real person and trying to look like the man himself. It turns out Kenny Wells is a fictional character and Gold is loosely, loosely based on a magazine article about a mining company that went belly up in the late '90s, nearly ten years after the period in which Gold is based.
Since Wells is fictional anyway, why did McConaughey put himself through this? The character is not unlike many down-on-his-luck hotshots we have seen over the years. McConaughey's transformation is distracting. He has enough scenes in his skivvies to show us the paunch isn't prosthetic, but he would have been better off developing a real person instead of developing his waistline. McConaughey is great at the gift of gab and high energy characters. He does more here with what he is given than many actors might have, but in the end do we really care enough about Kenny to go through the perfunctory highs and lows he ultimately encounters?
As Gold opens in the early 1980s, Kenny runs Washoe Mining Company in Reno with his father (Nelson). It is a family business and business is good, until suddenly it isn't. The ores dry up and Kenny and a few members of his loyal staff keep the company barely afloat by working out of a bar. Kenny has a sweet waitress girlfriend named Kay (Howard), who sticks by him and lets the staff conduct business from the bar booths. Kenny is rarely seen without a cigarette in his mouth or a drink in his hand. These devices give him something to do with his hands, but soon I found myself fearing for his lungs and liver.
In a last ditch effort to save the company, Kenny hooks up with geologist Michael Accosta (Ramirez), who used to have a knack for finding precious metals in places others don't, but who like Kenny is also in a slump. They agree to raise funds to dig up some of the Indonesian jungle where Kenny dreamed he found gold. After nearly going broke and battling malaria, Michael and Kenny indeed hit gold and Washoe is now back in business. The gold, and the money, flow into the coffers endlessly. The company's resurrection does not escape Wall Street's attention, and soon investment bankers are banging down the door wanting in on the riches.
We know the ride won't last forever, mostly because the scenes of prosperity are intercut with Kenny spilling his guts to the feds. A movie in which the hero strikes it rich and stays rich would not be anyone's idea of intriguing, so we await the inevitable moment where the bottom drops out. It does, but not without some scenarios in which Kenny nearly loses everything only to pull a sweet deal out of his ass. These are the false alarms. The real crisis involves betrayal from someone whom Kenny never expected to betray him. Only the person only kind of, sort of betrays him, which allows for a happy ending that feels tacked on. We don't believe a person who would go through the trouble of destroying the hero's dreams would suddenly do what he does.
Gold is similar to War Dogs (2016), another movie based on true events about a company that strikes it big in arms deals only to have it all go to hell swiftly. War Dogs worked better because it took the time to create some desperate characters whose motives we can understand. Gold is more like gold dust; shiny on the outside but mostly superficial. With all of that said, I enjoyed stretches of the film anyway, mostly because a cautionary tale we've seen numerous times since Wall Street is played out with some style and energy. But it never transcends into something truly special.
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