Boiling point

>> The Boiler Room burns up the stock market

by JOANNE LATIMER

It's slick, it's fast, it's self-mocking--The Boiler Room is a great film about the amoral greed underpinning a shady brokerage firm. This isn't a blue chip firm on Wall Street--it's much more diabolical. It's a shell of a company located in Long Island, just a little further away from the suspicious eyes of the Securities Exchange Commission.

We enter the story listening to Seth Davis (Giovanni Ribisi), our narrator and conscience. It's hard to believe in Seth as the good guy at first, because he's running a casino out of his apartment. His family thinks he's still in college and the casino would jeopardize his father's position as a New York judge. News reaches his parents that he's a college drop-out, and Seth finds himself scrambling for his father's approval by taking a trainee position at J.T. Marlin.

The frenzied greed at J.T. Marlin runs hand in hand with the young traders' macho bigotry, woman-hating and a staggering lack of conscience. Director/writer Ben Younger knows how to make an audience gag with his nasty characters--and gag you will.

In a hilarious moment, some young trainees from the same "crew" gather at their boss's house, where they've rented Wall Street. When Michael Douglas and Charlie Sheen appear on the big-screen TV, the crew recites the dialogue by heart and mimics the actors without an ounce of embarrassment. They borrow terms from Glengarry Glen Ross ("ABC: Always Be Closing"), they're not allowed to sell to women and they refer to rich customers as Whales.

This marauding band of recruits, Seth tells us, is doing the White Guy equivalent of "slinging crack rock." They're also starting fights in bars, taking drugs and hookers from the owner, and generally living down to our expectations. Rapid-fire editing and cool blue filters make everything a bit surreal, as Seth gets swept up in the fever. Seth hits his moral breaking point just before the SEC busts him, but it doesn't really matter, because what Younger is really after is the father/son relationship.

The film belongs to Giovanni Ribisi--not fellow trader Ben Affleck, who is no Alec Baldwin from Glengarry Glen Ross. Ribisi gives good voice-over, like Ed Norton does in Fight Club, thanks to one of the best scripts of this very new year. :

The Boiler Room opens Friday, February 18