Even if Oliver Stone’s latest picture dramatizes the 2008 economic debacle that still wracks our nation and the world, you shouldn’t sell it short as entertainment.
Because greed isn’t just good in “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.” It’s also oddly fun. You can credit Michael Douglas’ still titanic screen charisma, lots of pithy banter between its heavy-hitting hustlers and Stone’s intense directorial flourishes. There are weaknesses: The script’s explanations of the financial technicals (behind the real-life disaster) are impenetrable; the storylines resolve too neatly, too unbelievably.
But it’s hard to imagine that anyone could have packaged a more engaging yarn involving credit derivatives or screens full of symbols and numbers.
In the screenplay by Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff, based on characters created by Stone and Stanley Weiser for 1987’s first “Wall Street,” Gordon Gekko (a sparkly-eyed Douglas) is back. He’s done prison time for his misdeeds from the last time the markets imploded. But he isn’t the biggest bad guy here, and he’s still not the protagonist.
Like Charlie Sheen 23 years ago, an earnest Shia LaBeouf plays another naive idealist who gets slowly sucked under by ambition and the lure of riches — which Gekko metaphorically embodies. But LaBeouf’s Jake Moore has a more complicated relationship with this tempter. Jake wants to marry Gekko’s estranged daughter Winnie (Carey Mulligan), a muckraking left-wing blogger. Behind his girlfriend’s back, the young trader seeks Gekko’s counsel as he gets caught up in a maelstrom.
Jake’s giant investment banking firm, run by his mentor (a sympathetic Frank Langella), is being consumed by another behemoth, a fictional one obviously modeled on Goldman Sachs. The movie’s nastiest villain, Josh Brolin’s Bretton James, runs it corruptly, hoodwinks the government watchdogs, and sets off a lethal domino effect. Both he and Gekko use Jake in their schemes. An elaborate tangle of revenge and dysfunctional family unravels while the stock accounts of hardworking Americans are about to plummet by half.
Susan Sarandon and the legendary Eli Wallach round out the secondary cast of a first class studio production. Swirling shots of buzzing trading floors and gorgeous gatherings of Manhattan elites play against references to the worshipped original “Wall Street,” including a Sheen cameo and another David Byrne/Talking Heads soundtrack. Ironically, the young financiers who misinterpreted Gekko as a hero back then grew up to burn down our house again. As it takes you on a ride, “Money Never Sleeps” also makes you think about such things.
