Boiler Room
The Manly Art of the Con
Giovanni Ribisi’s character in Boiler Room does something I really like. He’s at home, eating breakfast, when he’s interrupted by a bored telephone solicitor ineffectually trying to sell him a newspaper. Ribisi is incredulous. “You call that a sales call?”, he asks, then prods the poor schnook into doing a better job of sales. Having talked the sales guy into giving rebuttals and not taking no for an answer, Ribisi’s character then hangs up on him.
I loved that scene, because it’s something I do myself (or did, before the era of Do Not Call). I spent two summer vacations in college trying to sell long distance and car warranties over the phone, and to this day I will hector any poor soul who has the nerve to call me with an incompetent sales pitch. (Lately, they’ve been calling trying to sell me on Caller ID to “screen out unwanted phone calls.” I say, “You mean like this one?” and hang up.)
Boiler Room is no essay on sales technique. At its heart are concerns of manliness and the lure of the con, the staples of any David Mamet movie. Only it isn’t: although the script pays homage to Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, it’s not a Mamet movie.
But all the elements are there: you have Ribisi, playing Seth, the young, innocent (sort of) initiate into the world of the cold call; the shady discount brokerage on Exit 59 of the Long Island Expressway, populated by fast-talking, hard-drinking macho brokers; the smooth, confident, profanity-laced talk (exemplified by Ben Affleck, in an extended cameo); and the pigeons, just waiting to be plucked by the wily pros. The name of the firm is J.T. Marlin, and its brokers are out looking for new fish to hook. (A really big customer is called a “whale” in firm lingo.)
Seth is our guide to this world. He starts at J.T. Marlin with the goal of impressing his dad (who is not impressed with Seth’s current job running a casino and sports book out of his living room) and to make a million dollars. Affleck’s character, the firm’s recruiter, is quick to tell his trainees that it’s only a question of when, not if, they become millionaires. Spurred on by this tantalizing prospect, Seth enters the J.T. Marlin training program, which consists of making cold sales calls almost like the ones I made when I was Seth’s age, and for not much more money. (Only AT&T never promised me any million dollars, or gave me anything but a refrigerator magnet. Not that I’m bitter or anything.)
Seth makes a Rake’s Progress through the world of J.T. Marlin, and it’s fun to see him get more and more self-confident about scamming rich doctors and wannabe rich salesmen out of their disposable income. It’s almost as much fun to see the antics of the other J.T. Marlin brokers as they roam the Irish bars of Long Island. (The movie actually begins with a party celebrating the end of an SEC investigation.)
Unfortunately, both of these subplots are much more fun than the real plot, which involves how and why Seth finds out that J.T. Marlin is crooked. The “how” is almost depressingly straightforward: Seth sort of stumbles into a series of little discoveries that add up to a big scam. He gets curious, and finds a few more things out, until he is able to deliver a maddeningly detailed and precise explanation of how, exactly, J.T. Marlin is able to sell phony stocks to clients.
The “why” of Seth’s actions — why he investigates J.T. Marlin, why he acts as he does in the final reel — is a little more interesting, although it’s never adequately explored or explained. My theory is that Seth’s experience running his casino has given him a good knowledge of how and why people gamble on dodgy stocks with the Dow above 10,000 (for the time being, anyway). However, it’s also given him a pretty good idea of what the house odds are, and he’s smart enough to know that the numbers don’t add up.
Boiler Room has almost every element of a good Mamet movie present but one: the twisty plots and cunning surprises that are the hallmark of any Mamet script. Boiler Room is like a live performance by a good cover band: entertaining, but nowhere near the original.
Boiler Room also serves one other great, albeit unintentional purpose: it’s a great advertisement for Ameritrade. See this movie, and you’ll never see your broker — or the guy calling to sell you a newspaper subscription — in the same light again.