WhatzUp

Boiler Room
by Derek Neff

Young would-be stockbrokers joining the team at J.T. Marlin routinely become millionaires within a year. This, and the promise of finally earning the respect of his father (Ron Rifkin), is what leads Seth (Giovanni Ribisi) away from his illegal back-room gambling business and into the apparently legitimate world of off-Wall Street brokering. But with the obscenely high commission rates everyone at J.T. Marlin is earning, Seth quickly realizes that things are not what they seem. The question is, will this keep Seth from working there? Boiler Room is a frightening movie to watch; at first we're frightened for Seth, as he is surrounded by the high-octane, nearly sociopathic personalities of his fellow brokers, and then we're frightened of Seth, as he transforms himself in front of our eyes into just another shark in the waters.

Writer/director Ben Younger portrays the fast, aggressive culture of these upstarts with striking vividness and energy. The film contains several brilliantly-conceived set-pieces: there's the initial job "interview," in which Ben Affleck gets to perform one of the best, most warped movie soliloquies to appear since Pulp Fiction. There's Seth visiting the under-furnished and gaudy mansion of one of his obscenely rich colleagues for pizza and videos. (Everyone in the room knows Wall Street by heart.)

Perhaps the movie's most brilliant turn is when we enter the world of one specific customer whom Seth cold-calls, a family man on the verge of buying a new home. We follow this character through the rest of the movie, watching him give up his life savings, blindly led by Seth's brilliant sales pitches. What happens to him gives Seth's actions a sense of gravity and consequence. The ending seems a little contrived, and a mite bit confusing, but this doesn't really detract from the film as a whole. Boiler Room is a brilliant, disturbing movie, one of the year's best.