All About The Money – Film Review
by Frank L

Director – Sinéad O’Shea
Writer – Sinéad O’Shea
Stars – Fergie Chambers

This is the fourth documentary that Sinéad O’Shea has directed. It follows  A Mother Brings her Son to be Shot (2017), Pray for Our Sinners (2022), and The Blue Road – the Edna O’Brien Story (2024). Each of those observed aspects of Ireland from different vantage points. In All About the Money, Ireland only has a comparatively small walk-on part.

James Cox Chambers Jr. (known as “Fergie”) was born into extreme wealth in 1985 as a member of the Cox dynasty whose vast wealth over several generations has derived from Cox Enterprises. Fergie’s life has not followed any of the likely courses that such wealth confers. He has severed ties with his family and sold his interests in the various Cox Enterprises for a sum somewhere amounting to nine figures. At one level, that gave him options or a sort of freedom.

He applied in the early 2020’s some of his wealth to establish, on Marxist-Leninist principles, in rural Alford, Massachusetts, a 65-acre, six-home community. That is where O’Shea begins her story. She records aspects of its daily life, and there are brief interviews with various members of the community. In October 2023, after 7th October, a protest took place at Elbit Systems in which various members of the Alford community took part. Arrests took place, and the life of the community was upended. Fergie, having helped through his wealth with bail, then turned his immediate attention elsewhere and became closely involved in a Tunisian football team to which his vast wealth gives him access. O’Shea records his interaction with his Tunisian life. He then relocates to Ireland and resides for a while in the luxurious environment of the multi-starred Shelbourne hotel. So in a comparatively short period of time, Fergie has occupied and been part of three very different worlds.

Fergie in the Dublin period expands on some of his thoughts in relation to society and himself but also gives some insights into his childhood, which was extremely “troubled”, to use a euphemism. There are also interviews with his third wife, Stella Schnabel, the daughter of Julian Schnabel, the painter and filmmaker with whom he has a son. It is a life in which extreme wealth creates its own challenges and traumas. O’Shea seeks to comprehend Fergie in the film, but he did not like it and, apparently, with his extreme wealth, offered her a considerable sum of money not to release it. She declined.

The result is an insight into a world where extreme wealth is applied in a way that is not usual. But in another way, it is common – namely the belief that money and its power can solve all problems. As the world becomes dominated by a few tech billionaires and some autocrats who want to be billionaires, this documentary shows that extreme wealth creates its own problems.

O’Shea tells the complex story of Fergie with understanding. She allows his voice to be heard. He is not alone in thinking there is something wrong with the current systems. What is far from clear is what Fergie wants instead. He makes clear that he does not think his money will run out. If that premise is correct, for all his wishing for something else, he remains dependent on the current system. It is a film that raises many questions and does not try to answer them. That is its strength.