Business Goes to the Movies

The movie business has an amazing ability to capture history in real time, or something close to it. Casablanca, set in Vichy-controlled Morocco, was made in 1942, when the German-leaning French regime was in the middle of a four-year reign. All the President’s Men was released in 1976, just two years after President Richard Nixon resigned. And as soon as the financial crisis erupted with full force in 2008, filmmakers rushed to tell that story using their tools. In fact, recent movies have drawn inspiration from a wide range of business- and finance-related topics, from the financial meltdown to global warming, Washington lobbying, and, of course, the rise of social networks. Sorry. Make that "the social network."

Some of their efforts failed miserably. The Cartel, a look at the education business and the charter schools in New Jersey, was panned upon release. And some of their efforts produced middling success. You will doubtless learn a lot from the documentary An Inconvenient Tax, but it's not exactly a popcorn movie. Freakonomics won muted approval. And then there's Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist, Rebel. It is bound to be entertaining look at one of the last century's most notable entrepreneurs, but it was dismissed as being a bit on the light side.

There were some gems, though. Here, then, is our list of the seven most important business- and money-related movies of the year:

The Social Network

Given the well-documented history of Facebook’s rise to power, it took some audacity for director David Fincher and writer Aaron Sorkin to take so many liberties with the facts. But they sacrificed that loyalty in the interest of a more powerful drama. So what if Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has had the same girlfriend since his Harvard days? His portrayal as a lonely and awkward student serves the film well. The film does a great job of capturing the personal conflicts and lawsuits that were part of Facebook's story. It brings to life the actual, real-world dynamic of an Internet company gone viral, a process that is usually told in numbers, clicks, and page views. The human emotion that drives that sort of growth on the Internet is captured on film, and it's fascinating and illuminating to watch.

This is our Business Movie of the Year. It's a film that every entrepreneur ought to see. You'll never read a partnership agreement in the same way again.

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

Oliver Stone’s sequel to the original Wall Street does a pretty good job of isolating the causes of the financial crisis, even if they are made in broad strokes. As Portfolio.com columnist Gary Weiss noted in September in an interview with the director, an early version of the script laid the blame with hedge funds. That would have been a mistake. The final version of the story properly puts the big banks at the center of the crisis.

“I really wanted to make this about something that was happening, and I realized that the hedge funds don’t really play—they were a bad example for many people, but the banks are the key to the whole thing,” Stone explained. Given some of his past efforts, there was every reason to fear that this movie would be a conspiracy theorist's indulgence. But it's not. Stone is a journalist as much as a feature filmmaker, and those abilities drive this story.

Inside Job

Director Charles Ferguson’s examination of the financial crisis, narrated by Matt Damon and pieced together with interviews in the United States, Europe, and Asia, is an analytic look at disaster. “Inside Job contains too much hard evidence to be dismissed as a conspiracy theory, and enough bipartisan blame to dodge the "liberal rant" label. It is a profoundly important film to see, and when was the last time any movie was that?” the Tampa Tribune said.

Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer

For all his faults, Eliot Spitzer was America’s most aggressive and successful bulwark against Wall Street excess. As Weiss argued earlier this year, it may be time to bring him back. That isn’t likely to happen in the political arena, and the ex-New York governor isn’t working out too well in TV, either. Director Alex Gibney tackles his story and suggests that the onetime sheriff of Wall Street made too many enemies. Said Kate Taylor of the Globe and Mail: “Spitzer made powerful enemies with a combative style and unnecessarily personalized attacks. Claims he might have been the next Democratic president seem to ignore that he was a great prosecutor, not a great politician. Gibney doesn’t have anything more than tantalizing clues and a huge amount of circumstantial evidence, but he doesn’t need much more than that to indict Wall Street itself: When Spitzer resigned, they broke out champagne on the stock exchange trading floor. Shame on them.”

Cool It

Director Ondi Timoner’s film is based on the book of the same name by Bjorn Lomborg, the author of the controversial The Skeptical Environmentalist. Lomborg attacks environmentalist ideas on the topic of global warming, but proposes new approaches to the problem. “Debunking claims made by An Inconvenient Truth and presenting alternative strategies, Cool It finally blossoms into an engrossing, brain-tickling picture as many of Al Gore's meticulously graphed assertions are systematically—and persuasively—refuted. (I was intrigued to hear Mr. Lomborg say, for instance, that the polar-bear population is more endangered by hunters than melting ice.)” wrote Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times.

A Jack Abramoff Twofer

The disgraced Washington lobbyist got a double dose of cinematic love this year—one documentary, one Hollywood take, both incorporating the name Casino Jack. In the former, director Alex Gibney struck for the second time this year with his film, a chronicle of Abramoff's dealing with Indian tribes and their casino businesses. The full title of Gibney's documentary was Casino Jack and the United States of Money, and it used interviews with real-world figures caught up in Abramoff's dealing to tell of the corruptive nature of the politics of money. That was followed by a dramatic retelling of the affair with Kevin Spacey taking on the roll of Abramoff. Called simply Casino Jack, the Spacey movie (directed by George Hickenlooper) didn't catch fire with either critics or audiences. Sometimes, it seems, the truth wins out.

Who knows, for 2011, there yet may be a financial fraud prison film in the making.

---

Get more business intelligence from Portfolio.com:

• A Patient Traveler's Guide: Winter weather is wreaking havoc on travel plans in the United States and Europe. But passengers can take steps to prepare for the worst.
• Bezos at Warp Speed: Amazon.com had a strong year in the midst of economic chaos, and it owes plenty to the leadership of its Star Trek-loving CEO Jeff Bezos.
• Little Plastic Promises: Sales of gift cards are up this year, spreading joy both to merchants and to the growing number of websites devoted to swapping unwanted cards.

---

Steve Rosenbush is the blogs/industry editor for Portfolio.com.