Naomi Bishop (Anna Gunn) is a capable, attractive woman in her late forties, which in her world, is not good enough. She’s surrounded by younger women with tighter, slimmer bodies and unlined faces. She makes impressive deals in the investment bank where she works, but she’s now been there for 20 years and the last stock she brought to market did less well than some had hoped. As one male boss puts it, this may not be Naomi’s year. But she has a new project, which is to prepare the IPO, the initial public offering, for an internet security company called Caché.
Director MeeraMenon sets the film in Philadelphia, New York, Silicon Valley – all populated by mostly young people in new steel and glass buildings. Cinematographer Eric Lin makes the locations sparkle. Light dances off polished surfaces, and for a while this world looks magical, with intricate architectural lines and forms both inside and outside. Shots at night, taken from across the Schuylkill River, make Philadelphia shimmer – until you realize that the dance is a fake and a disguise.
This is the film’s picture of the world of finance. No one makes anything in this world. Life is a series of complicated deals and projections. Characters obsess over the uncertainty of how much the stock will get on its first day, but equal to that they worry over who has position over whom, who knows what and who doesn’t. As the movie rolls on, it’s clear that these people inhabit a limited space all by themselves. The movie shows almost no one outside this enclave of financial machinations – no street scenes, no places where ordinary human beings might live their lives.
After just a few minutes on screen, the fancy buildings become intricate, expensive traps, where soulless lives twitch onwards. When Naomi figures out that her main aide Erin is pregnant, a sour confused look washes over her face. The one character with children raises them in an apartment that’s as expensively grim as the rest of the movie, except that instead of the dominant steel gray and off-white, there are splashes of red and yellow. This is not a place for children, not because people are busy, but because they’re walled off from the common joys of human existence. Naomi’s version of love life is with Michael. Their few intimate moments are broken by doorbells or buzzing phones. She can’t tell him about her work, because that could involve insider trading. Michael is less scrupulous, though. When Naomi leavers the room, he searches her phone.
At an event for up and coming business women, a naïve moderator asks panelists what gets them up in the morning. Naomi answers that she loves money. At the same gathering, Naomi runs into Samantha, a lawyer who used to do social welfare work. She now tells Naomi that she’s joined Naomi’s world – white collar crime. She’s with the Department of Justice and Naomi catches the threat in Samantha’s voice.
The title of the film – Equity – of course, refers to stocks. Here, it also has to do with showing women who are more or less equal to men in the financial world – sort of. And the title is ironic because most of the characters in the film are equally awful and empty. Plus, women having the chance to be just as venal as men does not sound like a great social goal. And the place of women in this zone is still demeaning. Pregnant Erin has to flirt up a client; Samantha the mom, who is also Lesbian, plays seductive to get information from a male suspect.
After the first novelty that Equity is about women financiers, though, there’s not much new about the fi1m. Movies – and radio and newspapers – are full of stories of crass and crooked Wall Street types. Equity feels like old news. There are many things to praise in the picture, but it’s too little, too late for shock or outrage.
