Ri¢hie Ri¢h (1994)

Ri¢hie Ri¢h arrives from 1994, a year when a comic-strip billionaire boy could still be presented as an object of gentle sympathy. The film's cultural footprint is faint, and the research confirms as much: the keywords are wealthy, billionaire, family, and little else. We are asked to score a motion picture with almost no interest in the questions of the present moment, and honesty requires us to report that it mostly scores nothing at all. The cast is white to a degree that no contemporary studio would permit without comment, though a handful of nonwhite child friends drift through the sandlot scenes without anyone drawing attention to them, and Reggie Jackson appears as himself, a private batting coach. That is the extent of it. No racial thesis, no commentary, no self-congratulation.

The villain, Laurence Van Dough, is a greedy chief financial officer who moves to close the United Tool factory, which gestures toward a critique of corporate raiding. The film then declines to follow through. The Rich family is benevolent, the fortune is benign, and the resolution asks us to feel warmly toward inherited wealth. There is a lesson at the end about money not buying friends, delivered softly, the way a family film delivers lessons, without a lecture hall or a reading list. Gloria and Diane are competent and useful to the plot, and the film has no further thoughts about them.

The film remains a curious artifact: a children's comedy with a factory, a union representative, a hostile takeover, and a mountain carved into a family portrait. The progressive content is negligible, the nostalgia is genuine, and the whole thing sits at the bottom of the scale like a coin in a fountain. Some films demand analysis. This one accepts a shrug.