Equity, an expertly crafted financial thriller, is being billed as the first movie ever made about women on Wall Street. Press materials explain that it was “directed, written, produced, and financed by women, a collaboration among women in entertainment and business leaders in finance—the real-life women of Wall Street—who chose to invest in this film because they wanted to see their story told.” Writer-producer-stars Alysia Reiner and Sarah Megan Thomas deliver on that promise, weaving into their suspense story many potent observations about the challenges faced by women in high finance. But you have to wonder if the movie’s backers really understood what they were getting into, because the three women at the center of the story are less than heroic. What makes Equity not just a good drama but a great and daring one is that its female characters can be as greedy, ruthless, amoral, and duplicitous as their male counterparts.
Samantha—who’s raising two children with another woman—comes from the same generation as Naomi, and she has no problem with using her beauty to her advantage. In one of the funnier scenes she throws herself at a nerdy hedge-fund manager (Nate Corddry) during a cocktail hour, gets him completely smashed, and teases him into revealing some insider information he used to score a deal. When he phones her back later, screaming that he was tricked, she laughs it off and hangs up on him. In a way Samantha does the same thing with Naomi, trading on her personal charisma to get something out of her. Late in the movie, when Naomi visits Samantha at home, she’s left alone momentarily with the two kids, and the boy informs her, “I don’t talk to strangers.” Naomi replies, “It’s really your friends that will stab you in the back.” By that time the relationship between the women has become little more than a transaction.
Directed by Meera Menon
