Equity

Equity is a Wall-Street Drama with men in sharp suits and women in tight black outfits and high heels.Anna Gunn (who I know and love from Breaking Bad) plays an investment banker named Naomi, She manages Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) which involves finding institutional investors for privately held companies that are about to list on the stock exchange in order to guarantee a healthy initial share price. She's a very driven character who is under a slight cloud because the most recent of her IPOs didn't go very well. Her lover (Michael) works in a different part of the same bank, and he mingles socially with hedge-fund high flyers who are always looking for the next tit-bit of insider information.

The film is about the latest IPO, for a social media company called Cachet, Naomi and her underpaid and slightly resentful assistant Erin secure the contract and jet-set about the place looking for investors. Meanwhile, back in New York  Samantha (an old friend of Naomi's who works for the district attorney's office investigating white collar crime) is trying to dig dirt on Naomi's lover and a disaffected Cachet employee is trying to cause some trouble for the company's reputation.

So the action is all very tense and all very Wall Street. There lots of cab-catching, cocktail drinking, meetings in flash offices and watching graphs on computer screens. There's bossing people about and fishing for information. There's betrayal and undermining and each woman ( or man) is out for her or himself.

One of the things the film is trying to tell us is that no woman is an island. You can work hard, and make sure never to talk about your work to the wrong person, and keep all your passwords secure but because you don't work by yourself your co-worker failing to do all those things can cause you a big problem. And so can your customer not liking your manner or your clothes.Clothes did seem quite important. It struck me that on Wall Street men definitely get to wear the more comfortable clothes and that perhaps the next drama needs to feature someone who is both ugly and badly dressed

It was interesting seeing a drama of this kind where most of the major characters were women.   I felt we were being asked to look at the personal cost of this kind of career for women in a way we wouldn't have been asked if the major characters were men.

Equity is as much about the people as it is about the plot, so the viewer has to like the human interest angle. And since the human interest and human interaction is done really well, it's a pretty good watch,

Anne's rating 3.5/5