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Brimming with testosterone
Posted Thu, 11 May 2000
Twenty-nine-year-old writer/director Ben Younger's directorial debut, "Boiler Room", is a refreshing showcase of a talented, young male ensemble cast.
Set amid the frenetic world of telesales stockbroking, "Boiler Room" not only pays homage to classics of the corporate greed genre, but goes so far as to quote directly from both David Mamet's "Glengarry Glenn Ross" and Oliver Stone's "Wall Street".
Younger's film is set amid an environment where young guns make their first million in their early twenties, buy Ferraris, dress in Armani suits, accumulate more and more wealth and lose all sense of moral rectitude. In this world by age 27, as one character notes in one of the film's key scenes, you're over the hill.
The character in question is Jim Young, the recruitment executive at the firm of JT Marlin, played by Hollywood hotshot Ben Affleck. Here, Affleck's brutal delivery resembles that of Alec Baldwin's in the aforementioned "Glengarry Glenn Ross". He rants and raves in only two sequences, the last of which doesn't really work well, because - by this time - one has realised that he's trying to be Alec Baldwin.
The rows of phones that act as a workspace for JT Marlin is packed with tie-wearing white boys all chasing the green. These guys act like football players, grunting and whooping when an associate makes a sale. They even get into brawls in bars. Vin Diesel ("Saving Private Ryan"), Scott Caan ("Varsity Blues") and Nicky Katt ("Suburbia") are all impressive in performances that highlight this particular breed of urban modern male.
The film's central role, however, rests on the shoulders of Giovanni Ribisi ("The Other Sister"). It is a weight that the young pallor-faced actor carries with considerable skill. Ribisi plays Seth Davis, a 19-year-old college dropout who, after being reprimanded by his father - a judge - for running a backdoor casino out of his varsity digs, decides to take the straight and narrow into the high-risk world of the stockmarket.
It is Seth's relationship with his dad (played by veteran Ron Rifkin - "LA Confidential") that provides the film with it's emotional core. Seth's main desire is to please his father and gain his respect. He's bound to fail in this regard because the man is incapable of displaying affection towards his son.
As the film reaches its somewhat contrived climax and turns from an intriguing social commentary into a thriller, Seth visits his father at his court-room office and breaks down. Ribisi allows us to witness a vulnerable moment of sheer intensity that makes Affleck's strutting and shouting look like he's playing the cardboard baddie in a Disney movie.
Nia Long ("Boyz 'N Da Hood") is effective in an integral supporting role. She is the only female of real consequence in this "company of men" den.
