I hated The Wolf of Wall Street. I tried, okay? I worked hard to turn off my feminist brain through the onslaught of frat-boy wish fulfillment and gleeful, unexamined misogyny, but by the time the marital rape scene rolled around, I realized my efforts weren’t going to be rewarded. I thought maybe it was a good movie, just not for me, but I genuinely couldn’t tell—until I saw Meera Menon’s new film, Equity, and realized that I’d been right all along, because if you really want to tell a classic tale of the fall of a great man on Wall Street, it shouldn’t be about a man at all. It should be about a woman.
In Equity, that woman is ruthless investment banker Naomi Bishop, played with quiet fury and subtle humor by Breaking Bad’s Anna Gunn, who seems like she’s enjoying finally getting to portray a morally ambiguous, complex character after thanklessly foiling Bryan Cranston for so long. If you love smart, flawed, calculating women characters—think Homeland’s Carrie Mathison, How to Get Away with Murder’s Annalise Keating, any of the women on House of Cards—this is your movie. Naomi’s one of many complex, pragmatic women making their way through the corrupt world depicted in Equity. Sarah Megan Thomas and Orange Is the New Black’s Alysia Reiner both put in strong turns as, respectively, Naomi’s right-hand woman and the prosecutor investigating Naomi’s firm for possible corruption.