As ways to spend an indecent amount of money go, James “Fergie” Cox Chambers Jr. hit on a pretty decent-sounding one. A former heir to the multibillion Cox Enterprises fortune, since gone rogue with ample millions of his own, the now 40-year-old political activist decided to found and fund a communist collective in rural Massachusetts, offering free accommodation to less fortunate residents aligned with his Marxist-Leminist principles. It’s the kind of idealistic vision that can only be more complicated in practice, and so it proves in “All About the Money,” Irish docmaker Sinéad O’Shea’s timely, pointed examination of how capitalist privilege can corrupt even an expressly anti-capitalist project.
Beginning with its introductory title cards reminding us that the combined wealth of America’s richest 1% equals that of its poorest 90%, the economic lessons of “All About the Money” aren’t news to anyone who has been trying to carve out a living in the 21st century. But Chambers is a compellingly eccentric figure to build such a study around, at once slippery and transparent in his values and vanity: a self-styled rebel whose often heedless attempts to repudiate his elite heritage only wind up reinforcing the lofty protection that his background still affords him.
In a film markedly different in subject and scope from her recent, reverent writer study “Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story,” O’Shea probes Chambers with a cool head and an open mind, yielding many surprising confessions, though never quite pinning him down. Premiered in Sundance’s world cinema documentary section, this stylistically straightforward doc could find limited theatrical distribution, but seems best suited to find a receptive audience on streaming platforms.
Beyond his professed left-wing ideals, it takes a while for O’Shea to uncover the full reasons behind Chambers’ alienation from his excessively moneyed family — a dynasty that includes his father, renewable energy business 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 touch with. A history of childhood mental illness, drug use and sexual abuse emerges in fits and starts, but you’d be forgiven for ascribing a certain air of edgelord agitation to his image as a communist firebrand — which, if the varied slogans and symbols tattooed on his body and face are any indication, skips quite restlessly between sociopolitical causes and inspirations.
The residents of his Alford, MA commune, which comprises six homes and a multipurpose community center for a handful of left-wingers hired 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, happy simply to be a beneficiary of this generous experiment. Yet the fact that O’Shea’s interviews with Chambers begin with him holed up, some years later, in a luxurious apartment in Ireland suggests something has gone awry in the interim.
Much of it comes down to Chambers and his fellow revolutionaries’ response to the events of October 7, 2023, which includes his funding of Palestine Action US and an attack on a New Hampshire office of Israel-based military technology company Elbit Systems — the legal consequences of which see Chambers flee to Tunisia. The members of the Alford collective — in particular, ardent activist Paige Belanger — don’t have the luxury of that escape route, and feeling increasingly hung out to dry by their leader and benefactor. And so the communist dream crumbles.
Though O’Shea devotes some screen time to the stories and perspectives of these variously disillusioned acolytes, “All About the Money” is understandably most fixated on Chambers, a mercurial, unlovably charismatic figure who alternates wildly between animated supposed truth-telling and more evasive conversational tactics. But it’s often his most ordinary statements and word choices that give him away — as when he says that he felt Alford, as an investment, was “interesting as well as useful,” suggesting that this rather high-stakes human project was a curiosity-sating experiment more than anything else.
But then he warns us, too, that everyone should fear “an extremely wealthy member of the white American bourgeoisie” — ultimately characterizing himself as that which he insists, at least spiritually, he’s not. Who is Chambers really, behind all this provocation and prevarication? “All About the Money” never quite finds out, but it excavates enough to hint that he might not know either.
English (US) ·