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From SeeingBlack.com Movies/TV
The trio of women all work at the Federal Reserve Bank, the perfect symbol for a faded American dream and dollar. All three are striving to stay afloat financially. Bridget Cardigan (Keaton), a shrewd, college-educated housewife who lives in a big house in a leafy suburb, has been forced to take a job at the Reserve as a cleaning lady. That’s where she takes note of all the cash being wheeled around by Jackie Truman (Holmes) and how the old worn-out bills are forced through a shredder by Nina Brewster (Latifah). She convinces Nina and Jackie to join her in a scheme to circumvent the bank’s airtight security and put some of those old bills to new use. As events are unfolding in this country—with home foreclosures, layoffs, a falling stock market and rising fuel and food prices, there is a certain synergy between the real world and the plot of “Mad Money” that makes it the perfect, funny antidote for financial angst. By featuring three women at varying rungs on the economic ladder, it emphasizes both the illusion of American wealth and the common effort among the working class and middle class to “get money.” By placing Bridget at the center of the scheme, director Callie Khouri (screenwriter for “Thelma and Louise” and director of “Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood”) re-imagines and feminizes the criminal mastermind, and lets us laugh at greed and screwing the system. Though “Mad Money” is a re-make of the 2001 British TV film “Hot Money,” it might also remind fans of Queen Latifah, in a very vague way, of “Set it Off,” the 1996 film in which she played one in a trio of young, female bank robbers from South-Central Los Angeles. Of course, “Set it Off” was not a comedy and the race and class differences between the sets of robbers in each film will not be lost on us fans either. But this difference, quite frankly, makes “Mad Money” even funnier because the skinny, jittery Keaton seems so uncool, seems to have no slick in her at all and looks hilarious in a janitor’s big jumpsuit. Whether such an emphasis is fair or not, Queen Latifah’s roles serve as powerful signs for how Black women, especially plus-sized Black women, are depicted on the screen. Because she is big, it’s too easy for some to characterize her roles as that of a mammy or criticize any comedic acting she does as cooning—as if we can’t have our own clowns and comics. In the role of Nina Brewster, she is neither a mammy nor a clown, and while it seems for much of “Mad Money” that she is pegged as another motherly but man-less Black woman, that stereotype, I will divulge, is remedied. We can’t be mad at that. This review also appeared on Tom Joyner's BlackAmericaWeb.com. You can order Esther Iverem's critically praised We Gotta Have It: Twenty Years of Seeing Black at the Movies, 1986-2006 (Thunder’s Mouth Press, April 2007)at Amazon.com or purchase at your favorite bookstore. It makes a wonderful gift! Thanks! Read and search hundreds of reviews on SeeingBlack.com's Movies/TV channel and archive. Click here to post a comment or your own review of "Mad Money." © Copyright by SeeingBlack.com |
