A story about women on Wall Street, Equity is a slow burn film that eats away at your psyche and becomes more and more involving the longer it goes. It is a drama about females who thrive on competition, ambition, deals and strategy in a heavily male-dominated world. A female investment banker, fighting to rise to the top of the corporate ladder at a competitive Wall Street firm, navigates a controversial tech initial public offering in the post-financial crisis world. In this environment loyalties are suspect, regulations are tight, but pressure to bring in “big money” remains high.
Senior investment banker Naomi Bishop (Anna Gunn) is a sharp, experienced and resolute competitor in high-stakes finance, but her (mostly) winning track record is overlooked when she is passed over for promotion at her Wall Street firm. Her specialty is bringing Silicon Valley start-ups through initial public offering, but her last project left an industry perception that she had miscalculated the IPO’s value and mishandled the delicate process of going public. She needs a big win to dispel those clouds, so she puts aside her frustration and gets to work courting promising start-ups. Bishop works closely with her younger subordinate VP Erin Manning (Sarah Megan Thomas).
While Manning’s fortunes are tied to Bishop’s, Manning is shrewdly ambitious herself, but isn’t being rewarded adequately (based upon her contribution to the firm). For Bishop, a sense of unease permeates both her professional and private life. At a career-mentoring alumni event she reconnects with an old friend from college days, Samantha Ryan (Alysia Reiner). As a Justice Department investigator, Ryan has been taking on narcotics gangs, but now her focus has shifted to white-collar crime, investigating Wall Street finance. You just know these two women’s lives will continue to intersect but next time it isn’t going to be pretty.
There have been several movies about people getting too big for their boots in the world of high finance – from Wall Street to Wolf of Wall Street, but I had not before seen any in which the focus was women. All in the film has agendas and I can’t say any are too easy to like. That in itself is unusual for a movie, any movie, because the heroes are usually written to be warm and caring types. What Naomi Bishop cares most about is herself and making money and rising to the top of her firm. Her private life appears lonely in spite of a convenient arrangement with a man in the same industry as her. The same can be said for her 2IC, who is desperate for recognition and compensation and whose relationship with her husband is fraught. And then there’s the investigator who may mean well, but is required to be convincingly ingenuous in order to extract information from those who are flouting the law to varying degrees.
Slow moving, especially at first, the tension builds throughout and you can feel the fear rising among the principal characters. Equity is all about the power game and serves as commentary on the gross discrepancy between men and women in positions of strength and authority. It serves to reinforce that the world of finance can be mighty ugly and is nothing if not ruthless. It appears to me that these women would virtually tear each other’s throats out if it meant getting to the top. Rated M, Equity scores a 7½ out of 10.
Director: Meera Menon
Cast: Anna Gunn, Sarah Megan Thomas, Alysia Reiner
Release Date: 29 September 2016
Raing: M
Alex First
David Edwards is the editor of The Blurb and a contributor on film and television