by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran Charles a movie I
picked out of the DVD backlog because it’s one of the two feature films (so far)
directed by Callie Khouri, who “made her bones” writing the screenplay for the
film Thelma and Louise and got
picked to do this movie, Mad Money (dated 2008 on imdb.com even though the copyright date on the closing
credits is 2007), because it’s also about unlikely and ordinary-seeming women
becoming crooks. I was interested in Khouri’s credits because she had directed
last Saturday’s Lifetime “premiere” Patsy & Loretta, about the mentoring relationship between
country-music superstars Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn between 1961, when they
met, and 1963, when Cline died in a private-plane crash. Mad Money turned out to be the sort of movie that’s
entertaining but all too obviously recycled from innumerable past models,
starting at least as far back as 1951’s The Lavender Hill Mob: a “caper” film about ordinary and previously
law-abiding people who are tempted by the wealth that surrounds them into
staging a big crime to steal some of it. Mad Money also recycles at least two films starring Jane
Fonda, the underrated 1977 farce comedy Fun with Dick and Jane (in which Fonda and George Segal play a couple who
plunge downwards from their upper-middle-class lifestyle when Segal is suddenly
laid off from his high-paying corporate job and turn to street crime to make
ends meet; and 1980’s Nine to Five, in which Fonda is one of three secretaries dealing with a yucky boss
(played by Dabney Coleman — and there’s a creepy boss in this movie, too, named
Glover and played by Stephen Root, who proves they didn’t break the mold after
they made Dabney Coleman) and finally turning the tables on him. Mad Money began as a script by Neil McKay and Terry Winsor
called Hot Money which actually got made in
2001 (that one was set in Britain and the target for the thieves was the Bank of
England, though the original McKay-Winsor script was rewritten by John Mister),
and Glenn Gers got the assignment to rewrite Hot Money with a U.S. setting: Kansas City, Missouri, home of
one of the branch offices of the Federal Reserve. Bridget Cardigan (Diane
Keaton) suddenly loses her opulent suburban lifestyle when her husband Don (Ted
Danson) is laid off from his high-paying corporate job. Their bills pile so
high that they’re four months behind on everything, they have to list their home for sale, and in one
of the film’s most grimly amusing scenes Bridget has to pay off her cleaning
lady with a silver trophy since she has no cash. Desperate to earn the family some kind of income, and handicapped by being in her
50’s with a college degree (comparative literature) that’s useless in the job
market and not having worked in over two decades, Bridget finally gets a job as
a cleaning woman at the Kansas City Federal Reserve. The money she’s tempted to
steal is money that doesn’t officially exist: it’s worn bills that are taken
out of circulation and returned to the Federal Reserve to be destroyed.
Bridget
hooks up with two other low-level employees, Nina Brewster (Queen Latifah) —
who wants to be able to send her kids (she’s raising two boys as a single mom) to
private school so they don’t meet the usual fate of African-American children
in 21st century America (especially 21st century movie America) — and Jackie Truman (Katie Holmes, better
known as Mrs. Tom Cruise #3 — she was a last-minute replacement for Lindsay
Lohan after the film company couldn’t get a completion bond with Lohan involved
because of her much-publicized drug problem, though since her character is
supposed to be a druggie as well Lohan wouldn’t have been inappropriate; Holmes
will never have a reputation as an actress equal to that of Mrs. Tom Cruise #2,
Nicole Kidman, but she’s quite good here and her on-screen husband, Adam
Rothenberg, has the kind of half-homely, half-sexy Scooby-Doo guy look I actually like) — and notices that the
three padlocks that safeguard the Federal Reserve’s stashes of
about-to-be-shredded cash are identical to a $25 brass padlock sold at Home
Depot. So she works out a scheme that involves substituting their own padlocks
for the official ones and helping themselves to the cash, which they stuff into
trash bags and smuggle some of it out on their bodies. They get away with this
long enough that they have the problem of how to spend the money, given not
only that they are stealing far above their salaries but also the Internal
Revenue Service has a requirement that any time you spend $10,000 or more in
cash on something, you have to file a report stating how you got that money.
(The film doesn’t mention that this law has
a significant loophole — you don’t have to file if you spend the money on real
estate — which is how Donald Trump got in bed with the Russian Mafia in the
first place: in the 1980’s he was having trouble moving the condo units in New
York’s Trump Tower until he was bailed out by Russian mobsters looking for a
convenient way to launder their money and get it into the U.S.) In order to
explain how they suddenly have so much more money than they’re supposed to
have, Don Cardigan works out a scheme by which he’ll pretend to be a “corporate
consultant” and Jackie’s husband Bob will pose as a day trader.
They’re finally
caught by a Black security guard at the bank, Barry (Roger Cross), who in one
of the film’s most wickedly funny lines starts feeling up Nina (it’s been
established earlier that he has the hots for her and has been cruising her all
movie) and then tells her the jig is up — “Unless you have a half-dozen very
hard rectangular breasts, we need to talk.” Fortunately Nina is able to seduce
Barry, literally and
figuratively, into going along with their scheme in exchange for an equal share
of the money, and the crime ring only gets broken by the arrival of a bank
examiner (played by an appealingly dorky actor who’s hotter-looking than
Franklin Pangborn in a similar role in W. C. Fields’ 1940 classic The Bank
Dick but is still doing the
same sort of monomaniacal characterization) who figures it all out and gets
Glover to bust the thieves despite his protestations that nothing like this
could ever happen at a Federal
Reserve facility. (According to some imdb.com “Goofs” posters, it couldn’t: “When
currency is destroyed at a Federal Reserve, it is carefully accounted for:
serial number, denomination, and destroy date. In addition, the carts carrying
money are weighed full & empty — as well as the shredded output — with very
sensitive scales at several stages for comparative analysis. Allegedly, the
scales can detect the absence of a single bill. At the Federal Reserve, no
employee is left alone with the money during cash processing. In Federal
Reserve cash processing facilities, multiple denominations of money are never
allowed to mingle.” So don’t try this yourselves.) The thieves are arrested and
Nina the Black single mother is especially upset because a criminal conviction
— even one with no prison time — will mean her sons will end up in the
foster-care system (at this time Charles joked, referencing I Am Somebody’s
Child: The Regina Louise Story, “It’s not like Diane Keaton did anything really horrible, like try to adopt Queen Latifah’s kids”)
and she’ll lose custody of them forever.
The cops hold all the defendants
separately to see which will rat out the others first — the rat turns out to be
Jackie, whose condition for cooperating is full immunity not for herself but
for Nina so she can keep her kids — and ultimately the charges against them are
dropped by the Kansas City police but their ill-gotten gains are confiscated by
the Internal Revenue Service. Earlier in the film Bridget had used the name
“Capone” while taking a weekend vacation at a fancy hotel, an obvious in-joke
reference to Al Capone’s ultimate fate: he escaped prosecution for bootlegging,
murder and all his other more obvious crimes but was ultimately convicted of
income-tax evasion and served a decade in Alcatraz. However, in the final scene
they’re shown as having held on to some of the proceeds, which they declare is
their “mad money” (hence the film’s title) and they gleefully throw around the
screen just before the final fade-out and the end credits. Mad Money is a likable film but it could have been quite a
bit more — with my habit of mentally recasting movies with some of the other
people who would have been available at the time I fantasized a version with
Jane Fonda as Bridget and Whoopi Goldberg as Nina (however awkward it might have
been for her and Danson to work together again!); Fonda might have brought more
authority and spark to the role (Keaton plays her with a kind of glum
seriousness that went against her strengths as a comic actor) and Queen
Latifah, as much as I loved her in Chicago (and ache for the chance to see the Bessie Smith biopic HBO made with
her — for once a real-life filmmaker cast a biographical film with the very
person I would have used!), has too much on-screen integrity to be believable
as a crook, even a lovable one. But the real problem with Mad Money is the sense that we’ve seen it all before; it’s
an enjoyable movie (and at 1 hour 45 minutes it doesn’t overstay its welcome
like so many films do these days) but little more than that, and as a vehicle
for Callie Khouri’s directorial talents it doesn’t work as well as Patsy
& Loretta — if only because we’d
rather see a female-solidarity movie about women who make it above-board as
singing stars than make it on the down-low as crooks!
