Making Wall Street Sexy Again
All good novels, movies, stage plays, and even serialized TV shows leave a person wanting more, wanting to spend even a little time wondering about whatever happened to their favorite characters as they lived their make-believe alternate lives. Would something like Midnight Cowboy, Play it as it Lays, Ordinary People, Far From Heaven, or Magnolia really have been as haunting if we saw the characters "pick up the pieces of their shattered lives," as the cliche goes -- never mind live happily ever after? Isn't part of the grown-up charm of cable dramas like Mad Men, The Sopranos, and Damages (or even top-notch networkers like the late Law & Order and 24) that they don't offer easy answers, that they don't always wrap everything up with a little pink ribbon on top?
More to the point, one can count the amount of film sequels that were anywhere near as good or better than their originals -- The Empire Strikes Back, Godfather II, Aliens -- heck, even the second and third Scream movies -- on one or two hands and have fingers left over. The true test of a sequel is whether or not it (a) says or expands upon something new and important that wasn't in the original story, without (b) desecrating the original's memory.
And while it isn't quite as good as its parent, Oliver Stone's new sequel Wall Street II: Money Never Sleeps delivers on that promise in spades. Love it or hate it, Stone's original look at Wall Street was one of if not the most seminal movies of the Reagan era, and became the very symbol of 1980s conspicuous consumption and go-go, with the punchline, "Greed is Good."
Set against the backdrop of the summer of 2008, Money Never Sleeps reboots the parent film's themes of eager, headstrong young pups, desperately in need to both break out from their literal or metaphoric fathers' shadows, and yet equally desperate to find a role model, a "daddy" to look up to. The film focuses on Jake Moore (Shia LaBeouf, who more than holds his own with the film and Broadway veterans that surround him), a young half-Jewish, half-Irish, and all Long Island boy made good, whose late father turned to alcoholism after the last (early '90s) recession, after which his go-getter mom (some brilliant comic cameos by Susan Sarandon) abandoned her career in nursing to cash in on the real-estate boom.
Jake had been spotted by veteran financier Louis Zabel (Frank Langella) when he was but a teenage country club caddy, and after putting his bright young friend through college on scholarship, Zabel brought Jake to work at the investment house he has run for decades, Keller Zabel (a blatant metaphor for Bear Stearns) -- which by June 2008 is sinking like the Titanic in a sea of mortgage-meltdown red ink. Louis is trying to stop the bleeding before it's too late with foreign investors, but just when he's about to pull back from the brink, a powerful arch-rival outs Keller Zabel's condition to the New York Fed. Faced with imminent collapse, the proud old lion of Wall Street commits suicide -- leaving his protege ready to stop at nothing for revenge on the person who "killed" his mentor.
But Jake has more on his plate than that. For the past few years, he's been dating a young left-wing blogger journalist named Winnie (Carey Mulligan -- who also stars in the excellent limited-release Never Let Me Go, which I'll be discussing in more detail next week). And Winnie has even more "father issues" than Jake -- her last name is Gekko. Winnie has never forgiven her father for abandoning his family (per force, when he was thrown in the clink), or for the 1999 suicide by overdose of her older brother, who had his own meltdown of drinking and drugs after Daddy went to prison.
And of course, dear old Dad has an axe to grind, too. Released from prison two weeks after 9/11, after serving an unprecedented 8-year sentence for fraud and tax evasion, Michael Douglas's all-too-mortal looking Gordon Gekko waits forlornly outside the federal pen, watching black drug dealers and gangstas get picked up in limousines, while he has to hail a Yellow Cab. (The movie was filmed in the fall of 2009, but Gekko's grey hair and weatherbeaten face give him more sympathy than he perhaps deserves, with Michael Douglas's current battle with cancer -- to which all of us at the FrumForum wish him the best possible luck.) Now back in the spotlight with a bestselling book, titled (what else?) Is Greed Good?, the repentant -- or is he? -- Gekko wants back in his daughter's life, and sees his prospective son-in-law as the key to unlock the door.
While Charlie Sheen's immortal Bud Fox (who shows up alive and swell in a nifty, totally Charlie Sheen cameo, complete with two girlfriends) pushed the first domino that caused Gekko's empire to collapse in the original film, Gekko tells us that his real adversary came during his many criminal trials, in another of his proteges of the past: a coarse, venal hotshot trader named Bretton James (Josh Brolin), who had preceded Bud Fox as Gekko's boy-most-likely-to. Bretton had evidently provided the evidence that finally sent Gekko to Club Fed, and was rewarded for his cooperation by a well-connected Fed overseer by being set up at a powerful investment bank, Churchill Schwartz -- which has been betting internationally against its own subprime mortgage paper, almost hoping for a total real-estate meltdown. And it was none other than Bretton James who had pointed the finger at Louis Zabel and precipitated his suicide.
In 1987, when the original Wall Street burst on the scene, we were still living in a four-network world, with MTV, USA, CNN, and the Turner channels being the only cable outlets that made even the faintest impact. The internet barely even existed, and "reality TV" was limited to The People's Court, Donahue, and Jeopardy! One of the movie's funniest touches has Gekko reclaiming his circa-1993 Motorola cell phone upon his release from prison 8 years later, as big as a portable hair dryer, complete with floppy antenna.
The biggest strength of Wall Street 2, and its biggest artistic reason for existence, is that this movie is a reflection of the real-life world that the original Wall Street helped give birth to -- a world where high finance has become a sexy spectator sport, with entire cable channels devoted to it, an unreal reality where people for whom a half-off sale at JC Penney or Sears is a luxury are watching the latest stock market ups and downs the way they might watch Monday Night Football at the local sports bar. The movie even features a fist-pounding Jim Cramer and TV's "Money Honey," Maria Bartiromo, as she punctuates the all-too-real 2008 economic meltdown (as well as specially filmed segments with her "covering" the earlier scandal that precipitates the events of the movie.)
Maybe the point of Money Never Sleeps isn't just that there aren't any good guys and bad guys anymore, but that 24/7 financial TV, online trading, and the rest have so neurasthenicized us, we end up watching the film the same way we stare slack-jawed at the little ticker-tape scrolls on FoxNews and MSNBC, while computer special effects pop up at us from the screen.
While Money Never Sleeps is as cynical and conspiratorial as one would expect of a Stone movie -- it more than a little recalls Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story -- here government isn't an all-powerful "Cheney-Bush Junta" as in W, or covering up shadowy assassination plots a la JFK. Money Never Sleeps comes right out of the closet and says flat-out that in today's deregulated world, government exists only to be the geisha-like handmaiden to the ruling class. Oh, a couple of executives take the fall so that law, order, and the American way can be symbolically upheld, but it's clear by the picture's end who really rules the roost. "Big Government" is most conspicuous in this movie by is absence, and certainly the world of Wall Street as depicted in this movie is so far above the mental pay grade of a Huckabee, O'Donnell, or Palin -- or an Alan Grayson or Harry Reid -- the very idea that government even could understand, much less regulate what these people are doing, is reduced to camp.
"You still don't get it," Gordon Gekko growls at Jake Moore. "It's not about the money. It's about the GAME -- and that's all it is, kid -- a game." True enough, Money Never Sleeps is at heart just a Grand Guignol game, with more false starts and stops than an emergency room, to see which one of these gargoyles will be left standing. Even fathers, sons, mothers, and daughters throw each other under the bus. The movie is leaner, meaner and considerably more sadistic than the still-potent 1987 original -- here people destroy one another and the very U.S. economy for mere sport. While Shia and Carey's characters are by far the nicest and most decent, they certainly have their own self-centered, self-righteous cruelty, too. Everyone else in the movie is so (albeit entertainingly) disgusting, it’s more a question of hoping that the seeming "lesser" of more than two considerable evils wins.
And if that doesn't describe our current political situation -- what does?