The disenchantment and disillusionment with respect to the American dream is not thing of these days in which it seems that we float on the rest of the shipwreck of a capitalism that Donald Trump tries to revive like doctor West of Re-Animator.
Already in the years of the new deal we met those losers who had a three-day beard, delayed hunger for many more and greed in their veins. I am referring to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, that masterpiece of John Huston, perhaps the best and most accurate chronicler on failure, the epic of failure, that will never pass through the seventh art.
Gold – Poster Huston’s film flies in almost every plane this conflicting Gold whose vicissitudes of production, filming and premiere somewhat dumb perhaps are the metaphor of those same contradictions of a Hollywood little given to speak of failure.
Nor is Stephen Gaghan’s film specifically a treatise on the sinking and catastrophe of the Werner Herzog of the capitalists of impossible dreams.
There is more in him the strength and sympathy that the director lavishes on that ridiculous and pathetic character (born of the true journalistic chronicle) embodied by a chameleon and fluffy Matthew McConaughey, one of those anti-heroes, a rogue who rebels against the sinking of the Tinsel of the years of the imperial reign of Wall Street via scam, cheating and con.
That the North American cinema has always had sympathy towards these mangantes is something that does not need to prove. Gold has it, he has it even when we see how brazenly they are and how they build a El Dorado of cardboard with which to save their asses and give the tocomocho to capitostes of the Stock Exchange of New York.
For Gaghan it is this idea of appearances, scenery and representation that most interests him in the end, somewhat forgetting the Hustonian adventure in the jungle (and if in the end more than The treasure of Sierra Madre was a little The man who could reign?)
To speak in the background of that other art of deceiving, of the trompe l’oeil, the castles in the air and falsehood: the cinema. That all this network of fake gold mines end up resembling what it would be to create an overproduction (without money) in the Third World. Samuel Bronston, come on.
In favor: the creation of all that snowball of lies and appearances.
Against: it ends up being a failed blockbuster.
