Brett Ratner is not exactly a producer of sophisticated entertainments or a sensitive societal compass, so I was prepared for Tower Heist to be a tiresome mess. It’s not a perfect movie, but he’s lucky enough to be working with a script that is acid — if not revolutionary — about the callousness of the 1 percent, and has action sequences that if not precisely believable, have some nicely scary bits. I’m not hugely fond of the movie’s main premise — that Bernie Madoff-like Ponzi schemers are responsible for the recession, rather than people doing risky but entirely legal things and taking advantage of people’s financial illteracy — but Tower Heist manages to be a nice movie about the pain of downward mobility.

It’s not easy to make me feel sorry for investment bankers who have fallen on hard times, but Matthew Broderick, as the depressed ex-Merrill Lynch trader who Josh Kovacs, the manager of the Tower, has to evict, actually succeeds. When Josh comes to tell him to get out, he asks if Mr. Fitzhugh knows anything about the markets. “I don’t know. I used to know. That’s why they hired me at Merrill Lynch,” Fitzhugh confesses mournfully. “I went to Yale 20 years ago. Now, I’m a squatter.” Later, when Josh comes and finds him in a miserable hotel, he explains in a perfect deadpan that “I’m thinking of becoming a male prostitute.” And he provides a bitter perspective on why Arthur Shaw took on the Tower employees’ pension fund even after his Ponzi scheme started collapsing, telling Josh that “At a certain point, it isn’t about securities fraud. It’s about catering.” Some folks on the right have used the idea that Occupy Wall Street has downwardly mobile participants as some sort of evidence that the movement is about preserving existing privileges rather than a just realignment of the system. But I tend to think that it’s more about a recalibration, a reminder that the American dream is about security and equal opportunity, rather than the promise of vast wealth.

There’s another nice reminder of that fact in the scene where Josh informs the staff that his decision to ask Shaw to manage their pension fund has left them broke. “I never asked anyone to triple my portfolio,” Odessa (a very funny Gabby Sidibe) tells him bitterly, exposing the ridiculousness of the promise Shaw used to haul Josh in. She just wanted a reasonable rate of return. Lester, the doorman whose planned retirement is ruined by Shaw’s fraud, just wanted to go on a cruise with his wife. It was Josh, who listens to a ludicrous lifestyle radio show about cheese so he can recommend food and wine pairings to Shaw, and mistakes their chess games and Shaw’s professions of familiarity for friendship, who let himself get sucked into an unsustainable dream.

A key question for a lot of folks about this movie is what it means for Eddie Murphy’s career. He gives a good performance in a deeply annoying trope, the black man hired by pasty white dudes to teach them how to commit crimes. But he’s not nearly as much fun as Gabby Sidibe, proving she can crush comedy as well as drama in her turn as Odessa, the Jamaican maid turned safecracker for the team. I can see how some folks might see her as a stereotypical sassy, curvy black woman. But she’s refreshingly and hilariously tough and pragmatic, entering the movie to inform Josh, “My work visa is about to expire. You must find me a husband!” and later, when her plan to drug an FBI agent with a piece of cake fails, explaining nonchalantly, “He’s allergic to chocolate. I had to beat him.” And honestly, it’s nice to see a movie where a woman can be a member of a team not because she’s a hot distraction, but because she has skills that are absolutely vital to the operation.

I saw Tower Heist, Brett Rattner’s financial-scam thriller, last night, which was both better than I expected and confirmed a definitive trend: our movies are moving away form narratives of individual or localized hardship, like the foreclosure in Drag Me To Hell or the layoffs in The Company Men and Up in the Air, and towards identifying individuals and institutions responsible for the downturn and making them pay. So I was interested to read a bibliography put together by Loren E. Miller, a PhD Candidate at American University, and forwarded to me by a generous reader, tracing the evolution of financial regulation in Hollywood movies from 1914 on. Miller writes about the evolution from a moral and individual perspective from an institutional one:

The earliest silent films, created during the 1910s, depicted financial misdeeds as stock speculation and manipulation, as well as embezzlement…However, there is no real institutional punishment for financial misdeeds. Characters are punished by fate and misfortune, but there are few government repercussions…

During the 1920s, many of the same types of misdeeds are depicted in films; however the reasons behind the crimes and the punishments shift. Characters often have good intentions and noble reasons for committing misdeeds, such as helping an impoverished family member. These characters are often redeemed in the end of the film, perhaps because of the good intent behind their actions…

The 1930s is by far the decade with the largest number of films focusing on financial regulation. The increase in movies on this topic provides insight into the historical moment; the country faced the Great Depression after the stock market crash of 1929, and at the same time film technology grew. The motion pictures of the 1930s reflect the country’s preoccupation with the stock market crash, and the influence money can have on people. Many movies in 1930s include crimes such as embezzlement. There are also a fair number of films that survey past financial panics. During the 1930’s, characters that perform these misdeeds are subject to governmental punishments instead of moral ones. For example, The Gorilla mentions an SEC agent investigating a financial crime.

It’s not surprising that we’ve been here before. The question is whether a public passion for some sort of reform, or at least, for making the bastards pay — I haven’t heard a crowd cheer as loudly as the one did at the end of Tower Heist in quite some time — will actually translate into enforced regulation. Dodd-Frank’s still tied down in all sorts of missed deadlines and Republican obstructionism. Richard Cordray still hasn’t made it to his office at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And we’re not getting New Deal levels of public investment. Obviously robbing Bernie Madoff isn’t a possible solution or a systemic one. But I sort of see how it would resonate when institutional change doesn’t seem like an available option.

I looked through the history of African-American Academy Awards hosts for The Loop21 and concluded that as long as Eddie Murphy doesn’t emulate Whoopi Goldberg’s plethora of imitations and sticks to Richard Pryor and Sammy Davis Jr. instead, he should do just fine:

The Academy Awards, which have not been exceptionally progressive when it comes to recognizing the work of black actors and directors, had an animated duck host the Oscars before they tapped an African-American emcee.

Donald Duck co-hosted the Academy Awards as part of a crew that included Bob Hope in 1958, but it wasn’t until 1972 that Sammy Davis, Jr. took the stage with Helen Hayes, Alan King, and Jack Lemmon. Diana Ross followed him in 1974, again as part of a group, and Davis reprised his role in a group the next year. Richard Pryor hosted with Warren Beatty, Ellen Burstyn, and Jane Fonda in 1977 and again as part of an ensemble in 1983. Whoopi Goldberg became the first African-American to handle the hosting duties on her own in 1994, a role she’d repeat in 1996, 1999, and 2002. And Chris Rock was the last black host to run the show, in 2005….If Murphy wants to remind the audience that despite flops like Norbit, he belongs among their number, he might do well to follow in Davis’ footsteps and draw on the skills that bolstered his Oscar-nominated performance in Dreamgirls and sing.

I don’t think, as I know some folks do, that Murphy’s being set up to fail, that he’ll be asked to be edgy when the inevitable reaction of a bunch of privileged white actors to a politicized routine by a black man will be to take offense. Instead, I think Murphy has all the tools to be a fantastic host, but that he needs to make sure to put together a performance that doesn’t remind the audiences in the theater and at home that he’s used those tools in pure pursuit of money far more often (at least in recent years) that he’s applied them to the cause of art. His race will be a factor in how Murphy’s received, but so will the sense of how much he actually cares about movie greatness.