Early in Risk/Reward, a middling documentary about four women on Wall Street, a floor broker at the New York Stock Exchange drops a startling factoid: Of the 1,366 NYSE members at the time, 44 were women. For directors Elizabeth Holder and Xan Parker, this should be a major hook, an opportunity to document an imposing and hostile environment for women entering the workplace. How do they cope in the company of men, where the competitive atmosphere favors a virulent strain of bullishness? And what sort of character do they have to possess in order to gain authority and respect?
Though they spend ample time absorbing the high-energy clamor of the trading floor, Holder and Parker are less successful at deciphering its coded language than tracking the anxious lives of those who can speak it fluently. They also seem to lose interest quickly in their thesis about women seeking their "financial and psychological independence," which dissolves into something like a quartet of magazine profiles, some more compelling than others. For all the film's aggressive crosscutting, the individual stories would work just as well apart as together, because they pack less cumulative power when yoked awkwardly into one sweeping statement.
Filmed over the summer and fall of 2001, when it serendipitously overlapped with the post-Sept. 11 upheavals at home and in the marketplace, Risk/Reward follows four subjects who hold varying positions on Wall Street. Three of the four are already proven quantities: Louise Jones, a successful floor trader who holds one of those 44 female seats on the NYSE; Carol Warner Wilkes, a high-strung equity research analyst who's ranked among the best in the business; and Kimberly Euston, a foreign exchange dealer whose services are coveted by two different companies. The odd woman out is young Umber Ahmad, a Pakistani-American at Wharton Business School who spends the summer working a key internship at Morgan Stanley, where she hopes to land after graduation.
The three older women each balance work and motherhood, in two cases relying heavily on their husbands to play Mr. Mom. One quits to care for her first child, but the others are shackled to their desks by "golden handcuffs," sacrificing hours now so they can enjoy an early retirement down the road. Their devotion to their jobs is inspiring and sometimes a little bit crazy—Wilkes makes business calls from the maternity ward—but Risk/Reward is most engaging when it peeks into their home life. A thread that follows Jones from the phone booth where she was abandoned as a newborn to her proud adoptive parents would be enough for another documentary in itself. One life fully explored equals more than four revealed in part.