Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

I've tried to write something insightful and measured about Oliver Stone's resurrection of his 80s Gordon Gekko (Wall Street). But I'd rather let my feelings have a bit of a voice too for once. After all, this is a film deeply interested in emotion versus reason, good sense versus business at all costs. 

Eight years in prison, and a further seven and a book deal later sees Gekko (Michael Douglas) return to New York; his book, Is Greed Good?, puts him on the periphery of Wall Street. The collapse of young Streeter Jake's (Shia LaBeouf) firm and the subsequent suicide of his boss Zabel (Frank Langella) sees Jake lose his job and attend a talk by Gekko to fill the time. He's taken with Gekko's no-nonsense approach. Oh and he's dating Gekko's daughter, Winnie (Carey Mulligan), who, despite her father's misdeeds, is still happy enough to shack up with another yuppie.  (That decision is never explained. While that irks, it's clearly a sensible choice to get going in medias res and avoid the awkward, unbeliavable wooing scenes we might have been subjected to. The audience is left with a frustrating gap, but one they can blithely try to ignore.)

So Jake and Gordo get to trading info and hatching plots. Jake wants revenge on whoever screwed over his ol' boss; Gordo wants a relationship with Winnie. LeBeouf and Douglas are both watchable; it's certainly Shia's best performance. He squeezes out a tear or two, even if I struggled to understand why we should quite like him. At heart, that's what really left me astray here: in a world in which everyone's either a bastard or dating a bastard or related to a bastard, should we really want to watch or care?

But the show's stolen by the supporting cast anyway. The clueless mother (Sarandon, complete with noo yawk drawl), Zabel (who's a bear, if a woefully underwritten part, and whose choices clearly underpin the entire drama) and Bretton James (Josh Brolin), hulking around screen and truly a little bit evil. The chap pulls of a burgundy suit, for crying out loud. Can one get any more satanic? They're all eminently watchable, and they cover up the flaws of the film marvellously. Meanwhile Mulligan pulls every tear she can out of the bag and we have a wet (read: needy, lovable, cute) love interest to keep Shia's eye.

There are flaws: the effects, the flow of ticker tape numbers across sped up cityscapes and the laughable fusion animation (A weak strand to the story: recession blocks fusion break-through. Really?) are all fairly needless. As are the scene changes that one can animate straight from a desktop: who's used a shrink-to-centre-of-screen-circle since Jimmy Bond? It's glossy but meaningless. 

And of course that's a good thing, that's a great thing, if it reflects the message of the film, that all this wealth, and money for money's sake, is empty and worthless compared to love, life and time with those you care about. Jake's story is meaningful as far as one hopes his failures will teach him that Wall Street is a corrupt, greedy and evil system made up of unthinking drones and hateful prospectors, a system he should avoid. For a moment it really, really looks like he might escape. He gets burnt and I prayed he'd learn his lesson. 

But damn, Hollywood, even with a strong script and great director and talented cast, you have to go sugarcoat the ending. Gekko gets his happily ever after; Winnie receives her father and son and Jake gets her back. And the yuppies are all there too, sitting around celebrating riches and success, as the financial system writhes in near-death throes. There's no comeuppance, no punishment, no lesson, if not keep kidding yourself you're still human. 

Perhaps it is I who remains the fantasist. Wall Street is horribly faithful to real life and recent history in that regard. Crooks did make a pot of dollars out of the 2008 crash and subsequent defaults and debt. They did get away with it and get government bailouts to boot. And there's been no punishment. So then the fault remains my own: Wall Street will always be an unhappy ending, precisely because it's happy for the antiheroes of the film. But does that make it enjoyable viewing, if one is watching something fairly horrid, and it's not provided with any kind of moral condemnation at all? Perhaps this is where Stone and I part company: he's happy to make a film that tells a story, and ends happily for those involved; I'd rather see the bankers strung up from the rafters.

~~~
2010

Michael Douglas, Shia LaBeouf, Carey Mulligan, Josh Brolin, Susan Sarandon, Frank Langella

dir. Oliver Stone