Subtitles:

English (SDH), Portuguese, Spanish, none

Extras:

This beady-eyed morality play is set in the hothouse environment of an illicit share-ramping operation, which 19-year-old numbers whizz Seth Davis (Ribisi) takes to the NY stockbroking firm JT Marlin after his father, a stern judge, shuts down his home gambling den. JT Marlin is a quicksilver enterprise founded on the get-rich-quick dreams of its customers and recruits alike. Everyone can become a millionaire here, Affleck's recruiting officer tells the new intake, 'the only question is how many times over.' Of course, other questions arise: Seth's secret affair with his boss's ex, company secretary Abbie (Long); his dad's continuing stern attentions; the customers fleeced of their life savings; and the attentions of the FBI. Not all of this works - the Oedipal angst of Seth's relationship with his dad is unnecessary and close to unbearable - but enough's credible and thought through to mark the film as a praiseworthy and auspicious achievement for first time writer/director Younger. Turns of dialogue ring compellingly true, and the well chosen cast (especially Ribisi) carry the inflections of the drama with some style.

 

About a third of the way into ''Boiler Room,'' Seth Davis (Giovanni Ribisi), a young stockbroker-in-training at a fly-by-night company called J. T. Marlin, drops by a co-worker's house for an evening of pizza and beer.

The house, a huge, expensive stucco affair somewhere on Long Island, is completely unfurnished except for a tanning machine, a leather couch and a big-screen television set, around which the power players of hard-sell stock trading, all men in their early to mid-20's, are gathered. They are watching a tape of ''Wall Street,'' and it's clearly a movie they've seen many times before, since they all seem to have the whole script committed to memory.

''Boiler Room,'' written and directed by the 29-year-old Ben Younger, is both an homage to Oliver Stone's 1987 fable of innocence corrupted by avarice and a critique of it. The baby sharks of J. T. Marlin like to play Gordon Gekko karaoke, bloviating along with Michael Douglas's mephistophelean arbitrageur and mocking his windy grandiosity. Compared to them, though, the reptilian Gekko is a great intellectual and a devoted humanitarian. His mantra, ''greed is good,'' strikes a sententious, faintly absurd note in the amoral world of ''Boiler Room,'' in which greed is simply axiomatic. When Gekko thundered ''I own!'' he meant he controlled large and consequential pieces of the world: companies, factories, the lives of thousands of workers. But Jim Young (Ben Affleck) -- Marlin's designated drill sergeant and, at 27, one of its wise old heads -- prefers to boast about his Ferrari, his mansion and his toys.

Gary Tooze

February 24th, 2013