In "Mad Money," Diane Keaton plays a suburbanite who turns to crime when she discovers she's $280,000 in debt.
She drives a Land Rover, her husband drives a Lexus, they live in a house that's worth probably $2 million and is well-stocked with posh furnishings.
Now it's true that we don't know how much of this stuff is paid for, but it's strange that Keaton and her downsized husband (Ted Danson) move directly past belt-tightening to outright theft as a means of achieving solvency.
Stranger still that director Callie Khouri tries to position Keaton as some kind of populist hero, sticking it to The Man and to a system that asks more and more of working folk while giving them less and less in terms of benefits, salary and security.
It's health insurance that Keaton's character is seeking when she takes a job at a federal reserve, where federal workers take worn-out currency and burn it.
Keaton (along with fed-reserve colleagues Queen Latifah and Katie Holmes) devises a scheme to steal small parcels of wrinkled cash, due to be shredded, so that over time a great fortune is accumulated.
"Mad Money" is a politicized attempt to make a comedy out of the middle-class squeeze - much as Jim Carrey's "Fun With Dick and Jane" remake tried to do a few years ago.
It fails. What's intended as empathy feels more like condescension, built around Hollywood's out-of-touch belief that anything below Land Rover is the poverty line.
Keaton persuades her cohorts to skim based on the argument that our economy has treated them unfairly. Latifah and Holmes, though, have rock-solid federal jobs. And important jobs, obviously, that compensate employees for both their labor and their integrity. "Mad Money" avoids an accounting of their actual pay and benefits, but expresses quiet horror at the lives Latifah (her children attend public school!) and Holmes (she lives in a trailer . . . with a meatpacker!) are leading.
Keaton's character has the only menial job, and Khouri tries to get laughs out of the very idea that somebody with an Oscar might have to clean a toilet. (We learn early on that she's never cleaned her own house.)
In fact, it's an imposition that she has to work at all. Khouri, who made her bones with "Thelma and Louise," has given us more likable women. *
Produced by Jay Cohen, Frank DeMartini and James Acheson, directed by Callie Khouri, written by Glenn Gers, music by Marty Davich and James Newton Howard, distributed by Overture Films.
