FILM REVIEW: WALL STREET: MONEY NEVER SLEEPS

Gordon (Michael Douglas) and Jake (Shia LeBeouf) in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.

Stone aged capitalism

By Ed Rampell

Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is a bold, visually stunning movie and the best critique of the capitalist system and its 2008 financial meltdown since Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story. 

The film opens with uber-financier Gordon Gekko’s (Michael Douglas) release from prison, where he has served around eight years for insider trading and other crimes he perpetrated in Stone’s 1987 Wall Street classic. This sequel, which is probably superior to the original, follows Gekko as he tries to re-establish himself in the world of high finance – where, Gekko observes, “greed got greedier” -- and in his daughter Winnie’s (Carey Mulligan) life. (In the original Wall Street, Stone had a son, not a daughter.)

The film explores whether Gekko’s imprisonment has humanized the “Greed is good” guru, and follows Winnie’s relationship with Jake Moore (Shia LeBeouf), a Wall Street trader who walks a tightrope between the type of predatory capitalism epitomized by his would-be father-in-law and a deep interest in green energy. Jake encounters another archetypal robber baron, Bretton James (played by Josh Brolin – a bit of canny casting, as he starred as one of the culprits of 2008’s economic catastrophe, George W. Bush, in Stone’s 2008 W.), who is sort of the Reagan era Gekko on 21st century steroids. At one point Bretton asks the alternative energy-touting Jake if he’s “an idealist or a capitalist?” Meanwhile, capitalism collapses around the characters.

In his previous film, South of the Border, Stone examined the phenomenon of what Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez calls “21st century socialism.” (The DVD will be released by Cinema Libre Studios on Oct. 26.) Now, in this bookend movie, Stone examines modern corporate capitalism, placing it under a Sherlock Holmes-like magnifying glass. The feature correctly, insightfully observes that more profit is derived from financial services than production in contemporary America. 

(A recent issue of the longtime independent socialist magazine, Monthly Review, ran a story on how capitalists in the financial sector have -- given the fact that the only things Made In USA nowadays are weaponry and mass entertainment -- surpassed the traditional industrial bourgeoisie as the ruling class’ dominant faction. Does anybody really think this decline in manufacturing is economically sustainable?) 

This film is a perfect goodbye gift for Larry Summers, as this pro-corporate wrecker of the American economy leaves his post on President Obama’s mostly woe-begotten team of economic mis-advisers. Their departures are eloquent admissions of the failures of their idiotic policies -- as if letting the foxes in the hen houses has ever worked as a crime-fighting tactic. Don’t let the screen door hit your ass on your way out of the White House, Summers!  

The superb cast includes Frank Langella, whose previous star turns as Dracula and Tricky Dick (he was Oscar-nominated for 2008’s Frost/Nixon) provided basic training for Langella’s portrayal of Louis Zabel, head of the doomed Keller Zabel Investments. (To be fair, unlike the Prince of Darkness or the disgraced ex-president, Zabel is actually human.) Venerable thespian Eli Wallach whimsically portrays another Wall Street veteran, who can remember the 1929 stock market crash. Oscar winner Susan Sarandon embodies Americans living beyond their means, depicting Jake’s mother, Sylvia, once a nurse who, her son muses, used to save lives, and is now a realtor ensnared in the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Sylvia Miles, who hilariously hustled Jon Voight’s male hustler in 1969’s Midnight Cowboy and played a realtor 23 years ago in the original Wall Street, is back for some more real estate wheeling, dealing and wheedling in the sequel, which includes cameo appearances by the original’s co-star, Charlie Sheen (Bud Fox), and by Stone himself, who is glimpsed onscreen a la Alfred Hitchcock.

Douglas is best of all in a stellar performance, reprising his Gekko part with a commanding presence that is absolutely guaranteed to win him an Oscar nomination -- and, I predict, another Oscar for portraying Gekko. A Douglas/Gekko win would be a first for the Oscars. Actors such as Raymond Massey portrayed abolitionist John Brown in 1940’s Santa Fe Trail and 1955’s Seven Angry Men, as well as Abe Lincoln in 1940’s Abe Lincoln in Illinois (for which Massey received his sole Best Actor nomination) plus in 1962’s How the West Was Won. Bing Crosby won the Best Actor Academy Award for 1944’s Going My way, and was nominated the following year for again playing Father Chuck O’Malley in The Bells of St. Mary’s, but did not win. Larry Parks was nominated for 1946’s The Jolson Story, but did not win the Best Actor Oscar, nor was he nominated for its 1949 sequel. During the 1970s Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro both won Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor Oscars, respectively, for portraying Don Corleone in The Godfather and Godfather II, respectively. Cate Blanchett was twice nominated for Best Actress in a Leading Role for playing Queen Elizabeth in 1998’s Elizabeth and 2007’s Elizabeth: The Golden Age, but did not win either time.

So if Douglas wins a second Oscar for portraying Gekko he’ll make Academy Award history. (By the way, the closest thing to this is Harold Russell, the real life disabled vet who won both a Best Supporting Oscar and an Honorary Oscar for playing Homer Parrish, a handless, wounded veteran in 1946’s The Best Years of Their Lives.) 

Awards or not, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is much more than simply a sequel, it is an original work of art that stands on its own, even as it draws from the original source. Unlike, say, bonehead Michael Bay’s Transformers flicks, this is much more than a mere money-making franchise (even if Gekko might wish otherwise, LOL).  Stone, the director of the 1980s Vietnam masterpieces Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July and 1991’s JFK, etc.,  is at the top of his game, and I predict many well-deserved Academy Award nominations for Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps – if not an Oscar gold rush. Don’t miss it – and don’t miss my interview with Stone in the September issue of The Progressive Magazine. (Say, if you can’t give yourself a shameless plug when reviewing a movie about capitalism, when can you?)

  



         

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FILM REVIEW: SOLITARY MAN

The leering eyes of Ben Kalmen (Michael Douglas).

No stronger than his sex

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.  

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