Gen­er­a­tion Wealth

When Gor­don Gecko declared ​“Greed is good” in 1987, a whole gen­er­a­tion nod­ded along in rev­er­en­tial agree­ment. At the time, Oliv­er Stone’s Wall Street was seen by the upper ech­e­lons less as a blis­ter­ing indict­ment of unreg­u­lat­ed cap­i­tal­ism, and more a style guide for the finan­cial dis­trict elite. Though the hal­cy­on days of the late ​’80s and ear­ly ​’90s have long-since passed, they hold a pecu­liar kind of fas­ci­na­tion for doc­u­men­tar­i­an Lau­ren Green­field, who began her career over 25 years ago, record­ing the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Gen­er­a­tion Wealth – her first film since 2012’s The Queen of Ver­sailles – is the cul­mi­na­tion of a life­long obses­sion with the obsessed.

As such, it makes sense that Green­field choos­es to turn the cam­era on her­self and her fam­i­ly, inter­view­ing her par­ents, hus­band and chil­dren about how her sin­gle-mind­ed­ness as an artist has impact­ed on their lives. At the same time, she reunites with pre­vi­ous sub­jects and old friends, includ­ing baby beau­ty queen Eden Wood, star of the hit real­i­ty show Tod­dlers & Tiaras, and FBI Most Want­ed fraud­ster Flo­ri­an Homm. Due to her per­son­al rap­port with her sub­jects, there’s an easy can­dour to the inter­views, the antithe­sis of Louis Theroux’s awk­ward blus­ter­ing. There’s a sense that her charm­ing sub­jects are cho­sen for their quota­bil­i­ty: ​“Does Har­vard Busi­ness School teach you to be a good per­son?” she asks Flo­ri­an. He laughs before reply­ing, ​“No, we’re fine-tuned to rule the world.”

There’s a glossi­ness about Gen­er­a­tion Wealth that makes it cap­ti­vat­ing to watch, rem­i­nis­cent of Adam McKay’s slick fea­ture The Big Short for its snap­py approach to explain­ing com­plex finan­cial terms. But instead of focus­ing on the mon­ey, Green­field is con­cerned with who has it and who doesn’t. She speaks to rap­pers, celebri­ty off­spring, a for­mer porn star and an ex-girl­friend of Don­ald Trump turned Las Vegas par­ty plan­ner, exam­in­ing the real­i­ty of what mon­ey can (and can’t) buy. There’s a slight trite­ness to all this, par­tic­u­lar­ly the sug­ges­tion that the best things in life real­ly are free, which is a belief that only ever seems to be held by those with mon­ey in the first place.

Look­ing past the twee exam­i­na­tion of money’s moral val­ue, Green­field pro­vides a fas­ci­nat­ing – albeit brief – look at the com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion of the Amer­i­can Dream, and its dis­sem­i­na­tion around the world. She vis­its a chip­per Ice­lander, who went from fish­er­man to banker to fish­er­man, fol­low­ing the tra­jec­to­ry of his country’s 2008 – 2011 finan­cial cri­sis. Mean­while, for­mer Com­mu­nist coun­tries such as Rus­sia and Chi­na, have rapid­ly embraced Cap­i­tal­ism and become lead­ing con­sumers of West­ern lux­u­ry goods. In a film packed with fas­ci­nat­ing lines of enquiry, these two moments in par­tic­u­lar feels wor­thy of fur­ther exam­i­na­tion, but despite its ambi­tion, there’s sim­ply not enough time to cov­er it all.

This doesn’t come as much of a sur­prise, giv­en that this film feels so per­son­al to Green­field – it’s less about wealth as a abstract con­cept and more her per­son­al con­nec­tion to it. Much like her pho­tog­ra­phy work, Gen­er­a­tion Wealth has all the sur­face appeal and charis­ma of a luxe cof­fee table book, but this doc­u­men­tary lacks the killer instinct to tell us, the Great Unwashed Mass­es, any­thing we don’t already know about excess.