‘All About the Money’ Review: Communism and Capitalism Collide

As methods to spend an indecent sum of money go, James “Fergie” Cox Chambers Jr. hit on a reasonably decent-sounding one. A former inheritor to the multibillion Cox Enterprises fortune, since gone rogue with ample hundreds of thousands of his personal, the now 40-year-old political activist determined to discovered and fund a communist collective in rural Massachusetts, providing free lodging to less lucky residents aligned together with his Marxist-Leminist rules. It’s the form of idealistic imaginative and prescient that can only be more difficult in follow, and so it proves in “All About the Money,” Irish docmaker Sinéad O’Shea’s well timed, pointed examination of how capitalist privilege can corrupt even an expressly anti-capitalist project.

Beginning with its introductory title playing cards reminding us that the mixed wealth of America’s richest 1% equals that of its poorest 90%, the financial classes of “All About the Money” aren’t news to anybody who has been making an attempt to carve out a residing in the twenty first century. But Chambers is a compellingly eccentric determine to build such a examine round, directly slippery and clear in his values and vainness: a self-styled insurgent whose often heedless makes an attempt to repudiate his elite heritage only wind up reinforcing the lofty safety that his background still affords him.

In a movie markedly different in topic and scope from her latest, reverent author examine “Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story,” O’Shea probes Chambers with a cool head and an open thoughts, yielding many stunning confessions, though never fairly pinning him down. Premiered in Sundance’s world cinema documentary part, this stylistically simple doc may discover restricted theatrical distribution, however appears best suited to discover a receptive viewers on streaming platforms.

Beyond his professed left-wing beliefs, it takes a while for O’Shea to uncover the full causes behind Chambers’ alienation from his excessively moneyed household — a dynasty that consists of his father, renewable vitality enterprise James Cox Chambers; his great-grandfather, former Democratic presidential nominee James M. Cox; and his grandmother, former NASA software engineer Margaret Hamilton, whom Chambers claims is the only relative he’s still in contact with. A historical past of childhood psychological sickness, drug use and sexual abuse emerges in suits and begins, however you’d be forgiven for ascribing a sure air of edgelord agitation to his picture as a communist firebrand — which, if the diverse slogans and symbols tattooed on his physique and face are any indication, skips fairly restlessly between sociopolitical causes and inspirations.

The residents of his Alford, MA commune, which contains six houses and a multipurpose community middle for a handful of left-wingers employed to work the land, aren’t inclined to look too deeply into his motivations: “If I didn’t live here, I wouldn’t believe it,” says one, glad merely to be a beneficiary of this beneficiant experiment. Yet the fact that O’Shea’s interviews with Chambers start with him holed up, some years later, in an opulent condo in Ireland suggests one thing has gone awry in the interim.

Much of it comes all the way down to Chambers and his fellow revolutionaries’ response to the occasions of October 7, 2023, which incorporates his funding of Palestine Action US and an assault on a New Hampshire workplace of Israel-based army technology company Elbit Systems — the authorized penalties of which see Chambers flee to Tunisia. The members of the Alford collective — particularly, ardent activist Paige Belanger — don’t have the luxurious of that escape route, and feeling more and more hung out to dry by their chief and benefactor. And so the communist dream crumbles.

Though O’Shea devotes some display screen time to the tales and views of these variously disillusioned acolytes, “All About the Money” is understandably most fixated on Chambers, a mercurial, unlovably charismatic determine who alternates wildly between animated supposed truth-telling and more evasive conversational techniques. But it’s often his most strange statements and phrase decisions that give him away — as when he says that he felt Alford, as an funding, was “interesting as well as useful,” suggesting that this quite high-stakes human project was a curiosity-sating experiment more than anything.

But then he warns us, too, that everybody ought to worry “an extremely wealthy member of the white American bourgeoisie” — finally characterizing himself as that which he insists, at the very least spiritually, he’s not. Who is Chambers actually, behind all this provocation and prevarication? “All About the Money” never fairly finds out, however it excavates sufficient to trace that he won’t know both.