The leering eyes of Ben Kalmen (Michael Douglas).
By John Esther
Later this year, actor Michael Douglas is slated to return to the big screen in director Oliver Stone's Wall Street: Money Never Rests to reprise his 1980s-greed archetype and the politically motivated Academy Award-winning character, Gordon Gekko, where the once Ronald Reagen-era demi-tycoon of downtown Manhattan reportedly comes out of prison and attempts to rebuild his kingdom in the George Bush Jr. era.
Not too dissimilar, in director and co-writer Brian Koppelman's Solitary Man, Douglas plays Ben Kalmen, a Long Island man whose own greedy disregard for others has brought him to the brink of woe and is now attempting to regain his robe and crown.
Once one of Long Island's most successful car dealers, six-plus years later after visiting a doctor -- who potentially has news of that fearful thing for the dedicated father and husband -- Ben is attempting to pull himself out of his current failures in family and finance. He has already lost his wife of many years, Nancy (Susan Sarandon), but manages a strained relationship with his daughter, Susan Porter (Jenna Fischer), and his grandson, Scotty (Jake Siciliano) -- much to the dismay of Susan's husband and Scotty's father, Gary Porter (David Costabile), who is probably more successful than Ben was at his age and far more subdued as well.
(Similar to this film's storyline, in the latest Wall Street, Douglas' Gordon is allegedly estranged from his daughter, played by Carey Mulligan. In the original Wall Street Gordon had a son.)
Feeling the patriarchal impotence of a man disconnected to his family, Ben buries up his manhood by continually seducing women of flaming youth (insert Catherine Zeta-Jones observation here). His current girlfriend, Jordon Karsch (Mary-Louise Parker), is not only considerably younger than Ben she also has enough income and influence to chauffeur Ben back on the top of the car lot.
Shall he dwindle, peak and pine? Ben would rather co-play the beast with two backs with women that threaten his family and financial future rather than be the king hereafter. A masochist of Shakespearean proportions, the more Ben sinks in his own dick-sand the harder he tries to pull out, only to ejaculate it in all the wrong places.
A thoroughly engaging film and by far Douglas’ best films in years, Ben's primrose path eventually hoists the anti-hero on his own petard without creating some false sense of pathos for the character. Ben’s expense of spirit in a waste of shame is motivated out of his perverted sense of control for his mortal coil and while it is not easy to sympathize for him, his itching palm is of a far more benign nature than those capital characters on Wall Street.
