Stone’s Wall Street Return a Timely Hot Ticket
Here’s a shocker, Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is both better than the original film that inspired it and the best thing the idiosyncratic outspoken director has made in almost two decades. It is a smoothly entertaining character-driven morality thriller that also just so happens to explain recent economic events in a way that is both informative and easy to follow. While a by and large a thinly disguised remake of 1987’s Wall Street, the movie still stands on its own two feet, and other than a misguided boneheaded misstep right at the end overall this has to be one of the more surprising success stories of 2010.
Michael Douglas is back as Gordon Gekko in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps © 20th Century Fox
As convoluted as the plot can be at times, and what with a myriad of overlapping characters all working at what appear to be cross-purposes that’s probably a bit of an understatement, the basic thrust is very familiar. Shia LaBeouf is Jake Moore, a young Wall Street up-and-comer who finds himself in the mood for revenge when his boss, mentor and dearest friend Louis Zabel (Frank Langella) kills himself after his cherished company is taken over by ruthless corporate snake Bretton James (Josh Brolin). To help him with his plan to hopefully put the hurt on James, against her protestations that he’ll hurt them both Moore turns to his environmental activist fiancé Winnie’s (Carey Mulligan) well-known felon father, onetime Wall Street legend Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas).
There’s a lot more going on than that, Allan Loeb (21) and Stephen Schiff’s (True Crime) intricate script going out of its way to weave as many of the past few year’s events into their narrative as humanly possible. Yet, while the pair don’t dumb things down, they present the intricacies of Wall Street secrecy and Machiavellian profit-driven intrigue in a way that is fairly straightforward. Economics have never been my strong suit but the pair do a great job of keeping things easily digestible, the backroom dealings behind who survived the bailouts and who did not worthy of their own 1970’s-style procedural thriller.
But the main reason this works better than the original did is that Stone and company retain their focus in a way that’s far more laser sharp than it was back in 1987. The characters and their respective journeys are the key to this film’s success, and while anyone with half a brain knows going in that Gekko cannot be trusted the filmmakers still managed to do a great job of making me believe that Moore could so easily fall under the charming huckster’s spell.
Douglas won an Academy Award for his performance as Gekko the first time, and he’s nearly as mesmerizing and as wonderful here. The early moments of him just getting out of prison and then resettling into a changed financial world are easily the best. You can just see the wheels ticking inside his head as he processes all that’s happened and the best way for him to use that info to his advantage. He’s a snake oil salesman yet one you really want to believe has seen something close to the light, Gekko’s observations about the financial meltdown so spot-on he comes very close to convincing the audience, not just Moore, that he really has changed.
The rest of the cast is nearly as good. Mulligan continues to showcase a range well beyond her young years, while Brolin comes extremely close to stealing the picture giving his villain so many shadowy layers I didn’t always know where he was coming from or what was going to be found up his sleeve next. Old pro Eli Wallach shows up for a couple of scenes, one of them near the climax a stunning testament to the man’s still superlative talents. Langella does as much as he can with a role that is really nothing more than a cameo, while Susan Sarandon pops up as Moore’s needy mother transforming a nothing role – as well as the film’s weakest subplot – into something far more engaging than it probably had any right to be.
As for LaBeouf, the guy has gotten a lot of grief over the past few years I’m not entirely sure he’s deserving of. I’m not the biggest fan of the Transformers franchise and I certainly get annoyed by him in the pictures but I blame the failure of the films (especially the second one) and his performances more on director Michael Bay than I do him. Same goes for his work in Eagle Eye and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (a film I appear to be one of the few who still like it, but that’s a commentary for another day). He did exactly what was asked of him, his hyperactive, somewhat annoyingly jittery mannerisms urged on by filmmakers who seem to think that’s what audiences want from him.
Thankfully, Stone actually lets LaBeouf relax a bit and play a real life adult character that doesn’t walk around acting like he’s hopped up on sixty-two gallons of caffeine. This is a smooth, very reserved performance full of emotional highs and lows yet one where the actor is forced to transmit those feelings in a reserved, almost cloistered way so as not to reveal what he’s thinking to others. His work is quite subdued yet very believable, and other than a couple of moments towards the end where he sort of reverts to some of his Sam Witwicky tricks I was fairly pleased with what he delivered.
There is a major problem and sadly it happens right at the very end so I can’t talk about in any detail. Let’s just say a character does something that is 100-percent unbelievable, sending me out of the theatre sort of laughing to myself and shaking my head unable to process why the heck Stone and company would ever think this was a good idea. It’s a bonehead move, trying to give redemption to a person who, not only doesn’t deserve it, but someone the audience loves all the more because they don’t really want it. I was totally perplexed by the move, and as great as the majority of the film is this is a colossal misstep that comes perilously close to ruining everything.
In the end, though, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is just too strong a motion picture to be derailed by a single moment. For the most part Stone keeps his wilder, more off-putting cinematic tendencies in check (although that song-driven Brian Eno/David Byrne soundtrack can be a wee bit odd) keeping things entirely focused on the plot and on the characters. Almost a quarter century later the director seems reinvigorated by his return to the Big Apple, showing that greed, in all its nascent colors, may not be good but that doesn’t make stories revolving around it any less pleasurable.
- Review reprinted courtesy of the SGN in Seattle
Film Rating: êêê (out of 4)
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