Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps Movie Review from a Buddhist Perspective

The second Wall Street movie, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, brings Gordon Gekko back to ask if greed is good after all. Gekko is a flawed guru, but this movie review from a Buddhist perspective suggests he's got some wisdom.

Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) emerges from prison just as his future son-in-law wants to get even with another trader for squeezing his mentor so hard he jumps under a train. Any suicide is tragic, but Gekko has the edge in patient acceptance while everyone else can't see beyond their self pity and anger. Gekko's daughter seems to think she's a humanitarian because she's got a website, but it turns out it's a sleazy tabloid that exposes the sex lives of politicians. Days after getting a $1.5 million bonus check, she and her boyfriend are whining because they lose $100 million dollars they know is stolen and that they've never done anything to earn. Their crimes against interior design are almost unprintable, but let's just say there's a large Betty Boop doll in their foyer.

By contrast, Gordon Gekko is poised no matter how much money he wins and loses. His observation that it's not the money, it's the game that counts is like the Buddhist injunction to regard all phenomena as dreams with the qualification that you still need to practice moral discipline and have compassion for the suffering in samsara. Of all the characters, he has the most insight about healing his own greed instead of blaming others. He even surrounds himself with reminders to take the correct view. His apartment includes a poster about the Tulip mania of 17th century Holland where flowers cost more than a house until prices fell to less than a cent on a dollar within weeks.

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is not as powerful as the first Wall Street movie, but it has some great moments. Director Oliver Stone's visuals on financial collapse are brilliant including a shot where the camera races down a glass skyscraper, dominos crash, and the numbers on the stock board plunge.

Movie reviews of Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps suggest that some people have not learned as much from recent events as Gordon Gekko. Wall Street behaved badly but so did a lot of people who lived beyond their means. Gordon Gekko may not be a Buddhist, but he shows that patient acceptance is more constructive than anger.