Not since Fight Club have I walked out of a movie so impressed at how accurately a filmmaker can capture the pulse of a generation. Boiler Room extracts the rich-by-thirty mentality out of the 20-something mind and puts it on parade for the world to pity, discuss and dissect.
Good movies can change your perspective on life, but it's not often that you see a movie that changes your perspective of your past. Boiler Room is a scarily accurate depiction of the get-rich-quick mentality infecting the minds of today's 20-somethings. It's an equally accurate portrayal of a newbie stock broker's daily grind. I can say this because I saw Boilier Room with someone who became a broker at an ibank in his early twenties who verified the portrayal. What's more, I'm a 20-something and almost took the same career step -- a step I am eternally glad I never took after seeing Boiler Room.
In an age where the media splashes million dollar 20-somethings across TV and newspaper headlines, Boiler Room takes a walk through the life of a 20 something (Giovanni Ribisi) who just wants to earn an honest living (albeit earn his entire life's living by the age of 30.) A facade of straight-up brokering turns out to be a snow job for a dirty operation where brokers artificially inflate the price of the stocks they push on their customers. Torn between his morals and the cash jackpot promised to every new hire by the age of 30, Ribisi endures a brutal admittance to the financial world that can only be described as hazing. From making new brokers stand up until they make ten sells to mafia-style inter-broker bar brawls, Ribisi unveils the ugly underbelly of a job he thought was on the up-and-up.
I won't reveal how the movie ends, but it's a journey that's eye-opening for anyone who is considering the financial world on the brokerage side. It's even more eye-opening for those of us that passed it up: It's easy to take a good or even decent job for granted. You go to work, enjoy some of it, and at the end of the day, you're earning an honest living. Boiler Room forced me to think about what I do each day. More importantly, it forced me to think about what I could have been doing each day and what many people are doing each day. This movie made me appreciate everything I've been doing professionally for the past three years in the context of what could have been.
Often, happiness is remembered, not experienced.
(Here is a link to the law firm's site that keeps tabs on the court proceedings for the firm I almost joined:
http://www.lawssb.com/hjmeyers
Few things have been as eye-opening as the reality I almost became a part of.)
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