Delayed Reaction: The Tinder Swindler

Premise: A documentary about a swindler…who works on Tinder…

 

I’m of a split mind about this movie. On the one hand, the story is insane and by making it a documentary, they are able to edit it to effectively show the simultaneous nature of the cons. This gives it a momentum that other forms would lack. On the other hand, this really feels like a glossy Dateline special. There’s nothing wrong with that. It just changes how I examine it. I don’t tend to write much about TV anymore. There’s too much of it and it’s much harder. Shows evolve over time, unlike movies. The constraints on time and budget as well as the number of hours, stories, and characters to play with mean I have to give different considerations to TV shows that wouldn’t fly with movies. If a movie has a B-plot that’s a total misfire, that can tank it. Even my favorite shows though have story arcs that are weak or performances that are best not mentioned. Season 2 FNL is the easy example.

 

I bring this up with the Tinder Swindler, because I struggle to determine which metrics to judge this with. If it’s the documentary equivalent of a Hallmark movie, I look at that different than a festival release. But here I am writing about it, so I guess that means I’m putting it in the serious doc grouping.

 

Simply put, the Tinder Swindler doesn’t pass the Wikipedia test. Did it add significantly more than a Wikipedia dive? Not really. Simon Leviev used Tinder to seduce women. He tricked them into thinking he was rich and maintained relationships with them for a while. Then he swindled them out of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars each. That’s the basis of a good story, but the filmmakers aren’t able to dig deep enough to make this more compelling than Wikipedia. They get three of the women and no one in Leviev’s camp. That’s pretty weak. On the victim’s end, three accounts don’t suggest the scope of his crimes. He conned many people out of millions. I want this doc to feel exhaustive in its attempt to track people down. It should feel like they had to turn people away because they had too many interviews. I want to feel the scope of his carnage. With just three – admittedly, the three most important in catching him – it all feels pretty small. On Leviev’s side, he’s too much of a mystery. From what I could gather, Leviev’s con is pretty impressive. He’s playing a huge confidence game. He has conspirators and juggles multiple marks at once. He gets out of prison at the end and is already back to living large. Like, he’s a crook, but he’s clearly quite good at this, yet we have no insight into him.

 

In my mind, I think about one of my favorite documentaries: The Imposter. If I imagine that as a 20/20 special where they interview 2-3 family members and an Interpol agent, the story would be interesting but incomplete. The fact that it gets Frederic Boudin to tell the story and the family her conned and agents to interrogate his claims is what fleshes it out into a feature film of substance.

 

So, in short, The Tinder Swindler is an undeniably intriguing story. Parts are satisfying. It dips its toes into discussions of victim blaming. The investigation feels very surface level. It’s more of a staged reading than a full production, to put it in theater terms.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend