Equity opens on investment banker Naomi Bishop (Anna Gunn) in a sushi restaurant with the shots framed so that the slats of the upscale restaurant’s decor look like a cage. Like in any good thriller, the feeling of a cage closing in is an apt opening metaphor for the plot. But this is not just another financial thriller that also happens to have a female lead, and as such, the caged protagonist might be seen in a second, more interesting light. That is, the cage surrounding Bishop might also be taken as a symbol of the precipitous position of angling for gender equality in such a corrupt world. Equity is a female-driven project — directed by Meera Menon, written by Amy Fox and Sarah Megan Thomas, and helmed by three female leads — but it is not just an exercise in reversing typically skewed gender representation. It is in fact a savvier critique of white, corporate feminist ideology than its audience might expect.
At the beginning of the movie, Bishop is just coming off of a fumbled IPO, causing her to be passed over for promotion. Details are vague, but it is suggested that the confidence she failed to command had more to do with her femininity than her skill. As Bishop collides with the glass ceiling, her assistant, Erin Manning, played with jittery intensity by co-writer Thomas, piles on behind. Determined to rectify herself, Bishop has moved on to her next IPO for a social media platform, all while an old college friend, Samantha (Alysia Reiner), a prosecutor for the U.S. attorney’s office, is investigating a sleazy banker with whom Bishop is casually romantically involved.
Equity stubbornly refuses to fall into the traps of Hollywood sexism. Ditzy asides are left to unnamed male underlings who make inane chatter about luxury destinations. At less inspired moments it can feel like a precisely calibrated machine engineered to defeat the Bechdel test. Nobody is competing for someone’s man in this movie. Women here talk business.
Allergic as it is to melodrama, though, the movie can seem motivation-less. This is an interesting pratfall that is endemic to the premise of flip-flopping gender without revamping the genre. Take your most famous Wall Street morality tales, Wall Street and Wolf of Wall Street. The thrill of securing the best-looking-blonde-of-them-all in the heady success before the fall is women’s role in each. So once women are freed from being a symbol of desire, how do you power the engine of the plot?
Despite this, I don’t think it hurts for motivations to be murkier in this setting. Movies about finance need a little more ambivalence and less vicarious joy, masquerading as moralisation. With no jubilation in the climb and even less moral reckoning in the fall, Equity translates what would be a simple story for men into a complex one for women because on this playing field, it’s not even clear what it means to win.
