James Cox Chambers, known as Fergie, is a gift to documentary filmmakers and a nightmare for documentary editors. Here is a man who covers himself in tattoos and Marxist theory, inherits a fortune worth roughly $250 million, and funnels it into a commune of fewer than a dozen people in rural Massachusetts who farm, train jujitsu, and refuse to let police officers join their gym. This is either the most sincere act of class betrayal in recent American history or an elaborate performance of authenticity by someone who has never had to be authentic in his life. O'Shea, to her credit, refuses to decide for you. The film's backbone is the Elbit Systems protest — the commune's confrontation with the Israeli-owned arms manufacturer that slides, per reports, into criminal mischief and criminal trespassing charges. Several Alford members are arrested. Paige Belanger, one of the communards, becomes a co-subject of the film as O'Shea cuts between her and Chambers, who by this point has relocated to Tunisia. He pays for Belanger's legal defence. He covers the costs. And yet rancour accumulates between them — the kind of structural resentment that forms when money is used to solve problems that money created in the first place. O'Shea's decision not to parse that rancour too carefully is described here as wise, and in some ways it is. She's right to sense that the emotional accounts don't balance and that forcing a verdict would falsify the material. But the consequence is a film that feels genuinely muddy at its centre — not productively ambiguous, but uncertain about its own subject. Is this about inherited wealth and its distortions of political commitment? About the gap between ideology and practice in intentional communities? About Fergie specifically, a 'confused soul' whose tattoos and discourse are described here as cover for adolescent trauma? All three films are present. None is fully made. What saves All About the Money from being merely frustrating is Fergie himself, who is, whatever else he is, genuinely compelling to watch. The film's instinct — correct — is that the struggle for authenticity inside enormous privilege is not a trivial subject. The sneering 'poor little rich boy' response is the easy one and the wrong one. Something real is happening in this man's life, even if the film can't quite locate it. His extradition from Spain is now being sought over alleged Hamas support, a development that reframes the entire portrait in a light O'Shea couldn't have anticipated. As a formal object, the film is workmanlike rather than distinctive. The intertitles that dispense backstory suggest O'Shea was working with material that was hard to structure, and she was probably right. The back-and-forth structure between Belanger and Chambers is functional but not elegant. What you're left with is a portrait that's genuinely worth sitting with, even as you sense the 90-minute version you watched is probably not the best version of the film that could have been made from this material. A longer cut, or a narrower one, might have answered the question the film keeps circling. It never quite lands.
