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TagsOliver Stone covers some of the same ground in sprawling sequel
BY JOE TYRRELL
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
MOVIE REVIEW
Although seduced and abandoned, Oliver Stone still carries a torch for robber barons in "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps."
More than two decades after the overly opinionated director set out to critique flim-flam and fraud in the financial markets with "Wall Street," Stone is back with a sprawling sequel, again centered on Michael Douglas as well-heeled lizard king Gordon Gekko.
By turns scintillating and chaotic, informative and overstuffed, "Money Never Sleeps" covers some of the same ground as its predecessor, but in the dismal light of a new and worse day.
Like the first "Wall Street," Stone intends the new entry as a poison-pen letter to the thieves and con men who style themselves as masters of the universe. But just like before, his jeremiad gradually bleeds into a valentine.
No wonder Stone gets dazzled on his latest tour of the haunts of the rich and infamous. There are helicopter rides and charity balls, fat cigars and big diamonds, inlaid wood and fast motorcycles, all illuminated by glowing lamps in private clubs and reflected in towers of mirrored glass. This New York tale is like Dickens without the poor.
Things start humbly, with Douglas' Gekko checking out of the federal pen, where he wound up following earlier hijinks. In an amusing scene featured in the film's trailer, Gekko gets back his few valuables, including a prehistoric mobile phone the size of a blender.It's a rough return to reality for the grizzled Gekko. That limo at the prison gates awaits a hip-hop artist ready to roll. Gordon, as he will complain later, is left alone to hail a cab.
Before history repeats itself, let's recap. Stone and his screenwriting colleagues (Stanley Weiser on the first film, Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff here) based Gekko on the scam artists of an earlier financial meltdown.
Gekko's famous line, "Greed is good," is only a slight variation on the actual words of financier Ivan Boesky to a cheering commencement crowd at the University of California Berkeley's business school.
"I think greed is healthy," Boesky said. "You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself."
That was in May 1986, when Boesky was a pillar of finance. Six months later, he was indicted for insider trading. His speciality was buying stock in companies being taken over before the deals were announced. In exchange for his cooperation, though, the Securities and Exchange Commission allowed him to do almost exactly the same thing, dump the stocks before his crimes were made public.
Boesky was fined $100 million but his willingness to rat out and even tape conversations with colleagues led to charges against others, especially junk-bond manipulator Michael Milken. (In 1991, Milken was fined $200 million, paid $400 million to damaged investors and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Two years later, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer and released. He's still alive.)
At the height of his celebrity, a profile of Boesky described him standing quietly in a corner at parties, and relying on hired assistants for advice on clothes and furnishings.
That's not authoritative extrovert Gordon Gekko. Indeed, there are no such wallflowers anywhere on Oliver Stone's Street. Even a youngster like Jake Moore enjoys cashing a $1.4 million bonus check and heading to "the money room" at an upscale jeweler. In this case, though, Jake's investing heavily in an engagement ring.
His girlfriend happens to be Gekko's daughter, Winnie, an apple who has rolled far from the tree. Winnie cannot even stand seeing her father, back in full self- promotional mode, on TV. As it happens, he's predicting bad things for the younger generation as a result of the Oughts' housing bubble.
The young couple are played by the always welcome Carey Mulligan and Shia LaBeouf — hey, who's protecting the world from evil alien robots? Winnie Gekko operates what is described as a "lefty website" in an office populated by model types. Jake secretly cozies up to his prospective father-in-law. But he fails to analyze the market as well as Gordon Gekko does.
"Money Never Sleeps" plunges its characters into the recent financial meltdown. There are losers, like Jake's old-line and over-leveraged boss played by Frank Langella, and winners, like high-riding Bretton James of a pre-eminent investment bank.
Delivering another fine performance, Josh Brolin plays James with all the shark-toothed smoothness that Gordon Gekko supplied in the earlier film. Brolin could be a younger version of Jamie Dimon, the CEO of J.P. Morgan Chase and Co., taking $25 billion in bailout money and then shipping jobs to India.
Fun fact: when Adam Smith used the phrase "an invisible hand" to describe the workings of free markets, he was arguing that merchants would naturally promote their domestic markets.
For example, Smith wrote, an Amsterdam merchant doing business in Konigsberg and Lisbon would funnel products through his home town even if that cost more, thus doing right by his own country and community.
"He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it," Smith wrote, but "frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it."
In other words, Smith wrote, businesses would know better than to relocate their operations and assets overseas — the very thing now passed off as "free trade."
"Money Never Sleeps" explores this new world, even as it revisits some of the plot points and emotional notes of the original "Wall Street." James and Gekko both are looking for a protege, and both see in Jake Moore in the role.
They also see his willingness to cut corners while convincing himself that he's doing right — and they thoroughly approve. Charlie Sheen, who played the novice trader taken in by Gekko in the earlier movie, has a brief cameo here, not long enough to compare notes with Jake.
Trying to accommodate many plotlines, this movie shortchanges the actual chicanery that produced both the near-collapse of the financial sector. But Stone does sprinkle some vivid insights into key scenes, such as the government rush to save these stylishly coifed, pin-striped scam artists while ignoring their hapless suckers, er, investors.
One of the script's most entertaining suggestions is that decisions on who got Uncle Sam's bailout largess and who didn't were as much a matter of settling personal scores as totaling accounts. Stone slyly cast actors who resemble failed regulators Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner, showing them rolling over for the Bretton James crowd.
As Gordon Gekko recognizes, things have changed in 20 years. In July, Goldman Sachs settled charges brought by the SEC over sales of mortgage-backed debt. The securities had been designed to fail so a hedge fund could bet against them, but other customers weren't told that. Goldman's $550 million settlement was less than Mike Milken paid almost two decades earlier, and the deal required no management changes.
Oliver Stone knows that. But he also imagines justice and redemption and other unlikely things. Just as in the first "Wall Street," Stone fills "Money Never Sleeps" with plenty of information and action. But the boy can't help it: he still makes Gordon Gekko and greed look more glamorous than anything else on screen.
Joe Tyrrell may be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
