The Bitches of Wall Street

Girl Power on Wall Street

Meera Menon’s powerful feature, Equity, navigates the trials and tribulations of women who try to make it on Wall Street in a world of ruthless male deal brokers and insiders that keep them at bay. In Menon’s financial thriller, women prove to be as cold-hearted and calculating as their male counterparts. But can they really make it to the top and have it all?
Alysia Reiner’s (Orange Is the New Black) and Sarah Megan Thomas’ (Backwards) production company, Broad Street, developed this financial thriller for strong female characters and made themselves and star Anna Gunn (Breaking Bad) available for the juicy parts that have been traditionally reserved for Hollywood’s leading men like Michael Douglas in Wall Street, Kevin Spacey in Margin Call, or Brad Pitt in The Big Short. Equity depicts a world where women try hard to break though the glass ceiling into power structures dominated by callous men.

The energetic, no-nonsense Naomi Bishop (Anna Gunn) has climbed the corporate ladder to financial success and a corner office at one of the world’s biggest investment banks. She’s tough as nails, confident she’ll get what she wants. But when a single IPO in her portfolio underperforms, her male superior overreacts and dismisses her many outstanding accomplishments. “This is not your year,” he threatens. He might be right.
When rumors spread about a forthcoming IPO she is managing, Naomi investigates. What she finds points toward widespread corruption within the financial sector. If the truth comes to light, scandal is inevitable. If it becomes public, it will ruin her career. Meanwhile, Naomi’s frustrated deputy Erin (Sarah Megan Thomas) is denied a promotion for the second year in a row. She wants to get ahead at any cost. Moral standards don’t apply to Samantha (Alysia Reiner) either, an estranged friend of Naomi’s, who now works as a prosecutor for the U.S. attorney’s office. A lesbian, she has no qualms about using her beauty and charm to seduce naive, Wall Street boys and use the incendiary information they reveal against them.
This tough world, in which men hold the purse strings and women choose power over sisterhood, is not pretty. The movie is not about solutions. Maybe, looking at the state of America today, there are none.

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