Posted in: Movies, Review | Tagged: film, gold, matthew mcconaughey, movie, Review

The Bill Reviews: 'Gold' – Matthew McConaughey Might Shine, But The Story Languishes

Gold is one of those films that you watch, maybe enjoy while you're watching it, but then a few hours after you've left the theater it's largely entirely left your thoughts. You find that you have to work at thinking back to recalling the details of the story. Sure the main plot points are there, but the rest of it just never really stuck. It's one of the current crop of "based on a true story" films, this one inspired by the Bre-X mining scandal of the late 90s and more or less follows the general happenings, though Gold is set a decade earlier.

Matthew McConaughey plays Kenny Wells, owner of a mining company that is quickly running out of time as their funds dry up from a run of unproductive prospects. Wells is a good enough guy, the film almost takes pains to make sure we know that he's not a crook, he's just driven and a bit desperate to keep his fathers legacy from folding completely. With a burst of inspiration he hawks the last of his jewelry (and some that he'd given his wife as well), to chase down a mineral-diviner with a near rock-star level reputation for accuracy – Michael Acosta (played by Édgar Ramírez) and convince him to finally go after a gold vein Acosta had boasted of being certain to be there several years earlier.

Acosta reluctantly agrees and the pair set out to start digging sample cores to test for the presence of gold. The overall roller coaster of the film follows a fairly predictable path. They get to their last dime (and a bit beyond, actually), encounter challenges (workers abandoning the dig for lack of payment, no gold being found in any of the initial cores, and illness), and then at that moment, fate smiles on them and their core samples start showing stunning amounts of gold contained in them.

From there the film shifts from the jungle to Wall Street as Wells has to return to raise the far more funds needed to shift from the sample cores to the hardcore mining and extracting the ore. The company goes public, cash is raining everywhere, and then the other gold mining concerns begin circling wanting to take their piece of the action.

McCounaughey does a fine job, and his transformation by gaining nearly 50 pounds and giving himself a receding hairline. In a lot of ways the performance feels a lot like his character from Texas Buyers Club. He transforms himself into the characters he plays, but while with Buyers Club it was a compelling and engaging story, Gold never really gets us to feel any particular tension for any of the characters.  The biggest tension in the film actually is an underlying sexual tension between Wells and Acosta. While neither of them is presented as being gay, there are moments between them that if they were to have leaned in and kissed, it would have surprised exactly no-one. But that path isn't travelled, and so we go through the motions of boardroom scuffles, the big twist in the whole gold mine, and then dealing with the aftermath.

I wasn't one that really liked American Hustle, largely for the same reasons – that I'd felt like I'd seen the general story any number of times before, and the characters this time around and the situation they were in, I just couldn't get myself emotionally attached to. And in films like these, if the story is familiar, the only way to make it stick and resonate is to make us really feel for and root (either for or against) the various characters. Hustle I didn't, and I couldn't here either. If you dug Hustle, you might find a better nugget of gold out of this one than I did.

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