Capitalism in its rawest incarnation rears its ugly head in Equity, Meera Menon’s Wall Street thriller due to open in Canada on August 12.
Tough-minded wheelers and dealers, their eyes on the main chance, appear and reappear in this hard-eyed account of an investment banker eager to advance her career as she cobbles together an IPO — an initial public offering — for a start-up.
Naomi Bishop (Anna Gunn), the banker in question, has clawed her way up from the bottom. Raised by a single mother of four children, Bishop is a shrewd operator who wears designer clothes, feasts on Tasmanian sea trout and gets around the country in private jets. It’s the kind of a lifestyle to which few can aspire.
Dedicated to the proposition that money is not a “dirty word,” she revels in the cut and thrust of negotiations, enjoys turning a “no” into a “yes” and strives to be “secure” and “powerful.” She’s a woman on the go, and the pace of the film matches her ambition.
Trouble is, she’s hit a glass ceiling and has been denied a promotion by her boss, who claims she’s “rubbed some people the wrong way.” Still, Bishop remains a valued member of the team, a competent, hard-driving person with a talent for crunching numbers and sizing up situations.
Gunn, who last appeared in the fabulously successful Netflix series Breaking Bad, acquits herself with aplomb. As Bishop, she’s charged with the task of buttering up the egocentric, long-haired founder of a social media network potentially worth hundreds of millions dollars.
Bishop is a discerning person, but hasn’t quite figured out who her allies and enemies may be. Erin (Sarah Megan Thomas), her ambitious assistant, has her own self-serving agenda. And Samantha (Alysia Reiner), her old university friend, seems overly intrusive. In fact, she’s a federal government investigator hot on the trail of white collar crime on Wall Street.
Responding to the pressures of her high-powered job, Bishop relieves her frustrations in a gym with a pair of boxing gloves.
In quieter moments, she meets her lover, a laid back hedge fund broker (James Purefoy) whose honesty and integrity are so questionable that she must be careful not to divulge confidential information to him. He believes in The Game, the system that makes Wall Street tick. “What else is there?” he asks revealingly.
Set in the sleek glass-and-steel towers of San Francisco and New York City, Equity is a study in deception and betrayal, a portrait of an insular subculture that discredited itself during the great recession in 2007 and 2008.
You’ll walk away from this gritty film imbued with the feeling that the machinations of the free market can be soul-destroying.