THE BOILER ROOM
"The Boiler Room" is the place that heats up like a pressure cooker from all the energy generated by the marketers who conjure up dreams of untold riches for unsuspecting marks on the other side of a telephone line. Their bogus stock deals are guaranteed to line nobody’s pockets but their own. The guys at JT Marlin are in it for the kill - the hard sell - the thrill of ‘nailing it.’ They’re a rough and tumble lot who party with the same zeal and wear their arrogance like a neon sign. They all want to be millionaires like Jim Young (Ben Affleck), who promises the world to the firm’s raw recruits as long as they’re willing to learn the ropes and go the distance.
College drop out, Seth Davis, is a small time entrepreneur. He runs a clean, successful gambling casino out of his home with a steady clientele of neighborhood regulars and the local college kids. Seth is proud of his accomplishments even if his father (Ron Rifkin), a federal judge, is not. Yet, Seth would do anything to win his father’s respect. The promise of respectability comes from a friend who introduces him to the high rolling game of stocks and bonds at J.T Marlin. Playing the odds with someone else’s money is something Seth understands. He takes to the trade like a fish in water but he doesn’t know he’s in the company of sharks Soon Seth finds himself in deep waters unable to get back to safe ground without sacrificing himself and his father’s reputation.
The simplistic need for his father’s approval is at the heart of "The Boiler Room." It spins on a contrived childhood incident that alienated Seth from his father. But it is a device that points to a hole in his character that does come across as all to real thanks to the heartfelt performance by Giovanni Ribisi. That Seth should find himself in a moral dilemma is a given, that he might resolve it is not. No matter what he decides to do someone will get burned - the guys who took him into their orbit - his father - or the secretary who loves him. His choices - and there are several - may seem predictable, but they nonetheless lead to some unsettling conclusions that hark back to Seth’s riff on greed and the choice of Rap role models at the beginning of the movie.
There are some powerhouse performances, particular by Vin Diesel as, Chris, the jocular strong arm in a Brooks Brothers suit who befriends Seth. His mouthing of the "Greed is Good" speech from Oliver Stone’s "Wall Street" is incredibly funny. The scene is played for laughs but the implications are scary because of his brazen embrace of an amoral code of ethics that reflected the mood of the country in 1987 and is still with us. Recent headlines told of several chop/shops that were busted for the same tactics depicted in the movie.
The tight screenplay by first time writer/director, Ben Younger, is supported by a complex web of relationships that remains true to the emotional fabric of its characters. Their are no real heroes in "The Boiler Room." The only real villain is the head of JT Marlin, who proves to be as illusive as the fish that Younger named his fictitious firm after. Everyone else is a victim of their own personal flaws, like Seth, or a dream founded on a good sales pitch.
The two obvious video pix
"Wall Street" (1987) - Michael Douglas won an Oscar as Michael Gekko whose "Greed is Good" speech provides one of the highlights in "The Boiler Room." Olver Stone’s movie opened within a year of the insider trading scandals of the eighties. With Father and real life son, Martin and Charlie Sheen.
"Glengarry Glen Ross" (1992) - An all star cast makes this adaptation of David Mamet’s Pulitzer Prize winning play about down on their luck Florida real estate salesmen struggling to survive in a dog-eat-dog world. A speech specifically created for the movie is shamelessly emulated in "The Boiler Room" by Ben Affleck’s Jim Young.
Some oldies but goodies
"Patterns" (1956) - Darwin enters the corporate boardroom in Rod Serling’s take on big business. Van Heflin and Ed Bagley join Everette Sloane in a role he originated on TV.
Scripts like this one created cemented Serling’s reputation long before The Twilight Zone.
"Executive Suite" (1954) - Dir. Robert Wise: Another battle in the boardroom, this time between the bean counters and the engineers. A company’s fate rests on its decision to continue manufacturing quality furniture and possibly go under or compete with the new methods of mass production at the expense of their reputation. With William Holden and Frederic March.