Oliver Stone's Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

There is much to ramble about with "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps", Oliver Stone's sequel to his modern classic "Wall Street". There's the fact that this is the first sequel Oliver Stone has endeavored, due mostly to the unmatched relevancy of a film about greed on Wall Street. There is the anticipated return of Michael Douglas's Oscar winning role as Gordon Gekko. The protégésque Shia LaBeouf also rakes in some needed acclaim after playing with "Transformers".

Any child of the Eighties owes a certain amount of debt to "Wall Street" for personifying greed at its best in Gordon Gekko. We saw this debt honored in Ben Younger's film "Boiler Room", whose A-list cast paid there respects in quoting Gordon Gekko verbatim. Michael Douglas's role as Gekko not only defined greed on Wall Street, but set a cultural precedent for perceptions of white collar crime.

Oliver stone and Stanley Weiser are of course the source of "Wall Street's" cultural impact as the writers. "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps" brings on a whole new stock of authors, additional to the "based on characters by" credit to Stone and Weiser. Stone brought on screenwriter Allan Loeb ("Things We Lost in the Fire") to craft a story by prolific writer Stephen Schiff; resulting in a smart, in-your-face film consumed by its own timeliness.

There are elements like fictionalized companies' based on financial companies like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. With this the film is ripped from the headlines in a way only Oliver Stone can pull off. The characters are conveniently packaged by the interwoven lives of Federal Reserve Board executives, real estate brokers, young capitalistic idealists, washed up stock brokers, over-eccentric hedge fund managers and lefty bloggers with a personal vendetta on American greed.

Oliver Stone has the talent of making historical bio-pics seem like they are clawing at your front door, for instance; "Platoon", "Born on the Fourth of July", "The Doors", "J.F.K.", and "Nixon". He equally has the ability to make current themes that are literally creeping through your television set seem like history. This is the feel of "Wall Street: Money Never Sleep", something Stone pulled off with films like "Natural Born Killers" in 1994 and "W" (which also starred John Brolin) in 2008.

While Charlie Sheen reprises his role as Bud Fox from "Wall Street" in a brief, almost cartoonish cameo, Shia LaBeouf is the young buck grinding his antlers. With mixed reviews of LaBeouf's performance as Jacob Moore, an up and coming propriety trader, his role is fittingly symbolic of an actor running with the big dogs. He keeps up in my book, not being the hole that sucks the life out of the film so many critics have claimed. It's no easy task trying to lock horns with actors like Michael Douglas, Josh Brolin, Susan Sarandon, Frank Langella, and Eli Wallach. Yes, at 95 years old Wallach already appeared in two 2010 films, Roman Polanski's "The Ghost Writer" and "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps". Of course LaBeouf is helped along by the gravity of Carey Mulligan's performance as Winnie Gekko. Her character being the moral ground upon which Jacob Moore and Gordon Gekko keep slipping, as lover and daughter respectively.

"Wall Street..." seems to suffer slightly from a case of the 'Voice-overs', as LaBeouf's narration about the Cambrian Explosion being the biggest bubble of all time bookends the film. Yet it is a fitting touch of intelligence woven throughout the story, accentuated by visual motifs of bubbles, cigars, and gaudy earrings. My favorite touch of intellect comes from, no surprise - Gordon Gekko, who has a poster about one of history's biggest economic bubbles, known as Tulipomania.

Gekko's poster references the peak of the Dutch Tulip Mania "where a single tulip bulb, in particular the Viceroy variety, sold for ten times what a craftsman earned in a year. That's the equivalent today of a skilled carpenter paying nearly half a million dollars for a single flower bulb. At the time tulips had been recently introduced to the Netherlands, generating an economic bubble of demand that collapsed drastically once Europe was flooded with tulips between 1634 and 1637." (1)

Another tremendous touch of visual intellect is the use of Francisco Goya's painting, Saturn Devouring His Son. Goya's disturbing imagery shows the myth of Titan Cronus (or Roman God Saturn), as he consumes the head of his son, fearing his children would overthrow him. An early sketch of the painting hangs in the eccentric office of Bretton James; Josh Brolin's Hedge Fund Character. Interestingly, Javier Bardem who was originally asked to play Bretton James, was in the 2007 film about the painter, "Goya's Ghosts".

The painting becomes a visual representation in the realized fears of James being overthrown by Jacob Moore in the protégé/mentor relationship. The painting also holds relevance to the relationship of Jacob to his would-be stepfather, Gordon Gekko. It is a work symbolizing the conflict between young and old, as well as the concept that time devours everything. As Gekko persistently preaches to Jacob, 'money isn't everything and the greatest commodity is time'.

The film is economically haunting, between Gekko's reformer status thinking about "bubbles" in prison and Eli Wallach's doomsday scenarios. Yet, the most puzzling part of these doomsayers is that greed is not reformed and the triumph of ideals is sold out. Sure, while seemingly relapsed to his old self, a reformed Gekko comes through in the end. Yet not in a way that says money isn't everything. Gekko in essence buys his time and affection from his estranged daughter and son-in-law with $100,000,000.

You'll have to see the film, as I've spared you the rambling analysis it would take to explain it. To quote Jacob Moore, everyman has a number, a price tag to give it all up and get out of the game, or in this case to compromise your principles. It may be a typical two-faced moral from Oliver Stone, but in the end all we learn is that money can buy anything on "Wall Street."

Sources:
1) Cangialosi, Jason, "Tulips: From Persian Blood to Tulip Mania", www.associatedcontent.com