Sinéad O’Shea’s Sundance doc All About the Money opens with a confession: James “Fergie” Cox Chambers Jr. sits in a hotel room, insisting that the people who claim not to care about money are always the ones most controlled by it. It’s a cynical preface that frames what follows—not a documentary about a commune or a political movement, but about a deeply complicated man whose orbit keeps shifting faster than the camera can track. What begins as an embedded look at a leftist micro-society gradually mutates into something more elusive: a chronicle of a restless, wounded, erratic heir who seems forever searching for meaning, belonging, or absolution, depending on the day.
The film follows Chambers, an heir to the Cox family fortune who cut ties during the 2008 recession and redirected his wealth toward anti-capitalist causes. The centerpiece is the Berkshire Communists, a small group living on property he owns in rural Massachusetts, where he funds their housing, food, and a prototype leftist jiu-jitsu gym. But when external events—and Chambers’ own volatility—smash the experiment apart, the film pivots across continents and crises, revealing a man reinventing himself at jarring speed and leaving unanswered questions in his wake.
All About the Money is most compelling when it simply observes Fergie’s contradictions. O’Shea captures someone who is both extraordinarily open and aggressively withholding, often in the same breath. He invites the camera into turning-point moments—faith conversions, romantic unions and dissolutions, political strategizing—only to abruptly shut off access without explanation.
The film’s strongest material comes from its earliest section inside the Berkshire commune. Jada, Paige, Reggie, Calisha, and Justin provide an unexpected level of sincerity and hopefulness as they work the land, lead seminars, and try to believe in Chambers’ vision. Their uneasy relationship with the surrounding community, paired with the genuine idealism that binds them, makes this portion the documentary’s clearest thematic anchor.
O’Shea also consistently foregrounds Chambers’ personal history—his estrangement from his powerful family, his struggle with addiction, his institutionalization at age eleven, and his complicated feelings around same-sex attraction. These moments carry the emotional weight the film otherwise struggles to hold together, and they highlight a central truth: without his wealth, Chambers believes he likely wouldn’t have survived. That admission, delivered plainly, lingers long after the credits.
The film’s greatest weakness is also its defining characteristic: it’s disjointed to the point of feeling unfinished. O’Shea is transparent near the end that Chambers attempted to buy the film to prevent its release, which contextualizes some of the narrative gaps—but it doesn’t resolve them.
Major threads vanish without commentary. Chambers’ leftist gym experiment collapses, his Tunisia venture spirals into scandal, and multiple marriages begin and end off-screen. His role in the Elbit Systems vandalism—suggested but never substantiated—remains muddled, especially as commune member Paige bears the real-world consequences alone. The absence of outside voices beyond the commune and Stella leaves viewers unable to fully evaluate his claims or motivations.
The international jumps, though fascinating, turn the film into a collage rather than a trajectory. Chambers converts to Islam, becomes a savior of Club Africain, celebrates moments that raise eyebrows—including a scene where the club honors the leader of Hamas—and then, without transition, is in Ireland lamenting betrayal. These narrative leaps may reflect the instability of Chambers’ own life, but they make for a viewing experience that is more bewildering than illuminating.
All About the Money ultimately feels caught between the film it set out to be and the one it was forced to become. What emerges is a portrait of a man who both denies and embodies the “antihero” label—charismatic, erratic, damaged, and propelled forward by massive wealth he can neither escape nor wield to his desire. O’Shea captures him at his most candid and his most evasive, yet the documentary offers few answers about who he truly is or what he genuinely believes.
It’s a film audiences will need time to process, and one that might inspire more discussion than it satisfies. In the end, the only consistent thread is Chambers’ determination to fight the systems that shaped him, even as he keeps recreating their dynamics in his own life.
Thought-provoking but frustratingly incomplete, I give All About the Money 2 out of 5 stars.
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