Moneybox

Melissa McCarthy’s The Boss Tries to Spoof Donald Trump and Suze Orman. It Ends Up Endorsing the Gospel of Greed.

Melissa McCarthy attends the Los Angeles premiere of The Boss on March 28. 

Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images

The Boss, the new R-rated comedy starring Melissa McCarthy, topped the weekend box office. It is not a particularly good movie. But if you want to deepen your understanding, just a little bit, of why personal-finance soothsayers like Suze Orman, lifestyle purveyors like Martha Stewart, and, yes, wealth-touting demagogues like Donald Trump continue to appeal to broad swaths of the American public, you might consider sacrificing an hour and a half for this insidious and reprehensible film. A supposed spoof of guru culture, The Boss all but offers a paean to the self-help business. In an accidental way, it’s enlightening.

McCarthy plays Michelle Darnell, an orphan no one wanted made good. We first meet her adult self on an arena stage as thousands thrill and cheer to her presence. She’s got an Ormanesque haircut and preaches the get-rich-quick gospel of 1,000 interchangeable self-help experts, including the one currently running for president. “I am the wealthiest woman in America,” she proclaims after descending into the arena on a phoenix as garish as Donald’s Trump’s gold-plated plane (with gold-plated seatbelts). “How wealthy am I? I wanted to come down on a golden phoenix, so I sure as shit did it.”

But soon Darnell is getting hauled into a police car, having been arrested for insider trading, and is sentenced to five months in the slammer. When she emerges, her eponymous business empire is kaput. Darnell ends up crashing with her former assistant, Claire, the only person willing to take her in.

(Could a business empire really fall apart due to a five-month sentence for insider trading? Highly unlikely. That’s how long Martha Stewart spent in jail for her own insider-trading conviction. Similarly, it’s hard to believe no one would express interest in a multimillion-dollar self-help guru after a mere five months in jail. For her part, Stewart ended up starring in The Apprentice: Martha Stewart while still under house arrest.)

Eventually Michelle escorts Claire’s daughter to a meeting of the Dandelions, a stand-in for the Girl Scouts, and here the movie inadvertently reveals a less-than-funny truth about American life. Helen, the mother of another Dandelion, objects to the presence of a parolee recently jailed for insider trading. We’re supposed to think her a humorless tight ass, which I also mean literally, since McCarthy’s character threatens to “shove a box of chocolate clusters up that tight ass of yours.” Spoiler alert: This is the kind of movie where she eventually does it.

Just one thing: Helen’s right. The Dandelions may be selling cookies to raise money for canoe trips, they may be old-fashioned, but they’re also on the side of the angels. Insider trading isn’t just illegal, but ethically dubious. You wouldn’t know that from The Boss. Instead of contemplating Michelle’s subpar moral compass when it comes to making money, it instead positions us to cheer Darnell as she makes her financial comeback on the backs of the Dandelions.

Yes, there is a late-act epiphany, though it doesn’t go very deep. Not only does The Boss fail to meaningfully mock its targets, but it ultimately endorses their me-first message. Michelle and Claire team up to produce their own brownies, staffing their new company—Darnell’s Darlings—with preteen girls Michelle lured away from the Dandelions by promising a cut of the sales. Screw merit badges! At the same time, Michelle cheerfully insults almost everyone, tossing off such Trumpian advice as, “First rule of business: Pretend to negotiate, then take what you want.” None of this lands with the least bit of irony.

Michelle’s damage is that, unwanted orphan that she was, she can’t recognize a family that actually wants her as a member. We’re supposed to view her relationship with Claire and her daughter as heartwarming. And maybe it is. But the message of the movie is clear. Michelle didn’t need to learn that money should be secondary to relationships. She needed to learn to be nicer to people while vacuuming it up.

So why, other than Melissa McCarty’s star wattage, is this film resonating? Well, I make the observation every few months that the United States, contra to our belief that we don’t enjoy a state-sponsored religion, actually has quite a robust one. It’s the Church of Self-Help, and the harder times get, the better it does.

Trump, of course, has been a member of the Church of Self-Help all his life. The minister of his childhood was Norman Vincent Peale, better known as the author of The Power of Positive Thinking. There are no permanent setbacks in Trump’s world. He presents himself as a self-made billionaire, his corporate bankruptcies not as failures but as smart, savvy uses of the law to protect what is his. His charity is forever self-interested—just this week he made his only donation to the 9/11 memorial just as he was attacking Ted Cruz for his comments about “New York values.” “I’m really rich,” he said during the announcement of his presidential run, presenting it as a job qualification. And yet Trump, himself the son of a real estate mogul, is about as self-made as the children of John D. Rockefeller.

Which brings us to the major self-help goof in The Boss. Michelle Darnell is presented as hiding her orphan background from her fans. A real guru would never do that. Triumphing over privations—the worse the better—is an essential part of the shtick. Orman forever trumpets her upbringing as the daughter of the owner of a failed chicken takeout shack. Dave Ramsey is always talking up his bankruptcy and the lessons he learned from it. That’s why Trump takes pains to make us forget his rarefied origins—that’s not part of the wealth-guru playbook. But that’s also one reasons the criticisms of his multiple bankruptcies never stick. In the self-help gospel, they’re a setback he needed to overcome on his way to fantastical, billion-dollar success.

Watching The Boss, you realize why so many people accept Trump’s fortune as a presidential qualification. Perhaps we, too, just wanna make money, which is what many of us venerate him—and Orman, and Ramsey, and even Stewart—for doing. Money is proof of gurus’ qualifications. If they’re smart, they know how to earn a buck. Ethics—those are for the losers on the other side of the deal.