By KYLE SMITH
New York Post
http://www.nypost.com
September 24, 2010
I liked Gordon Gekko better before he turned into Paul Krugman, but in “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” he is still at his core a seductive high priest of the money-changers’ temples. Welcome back, you sly bastard.The sequel to 1987’s “Wall Street” essentially makes no sense on either the micro or macro level, from clanking one-liners all the way up to the Meaning of Finance. But director Oliver Stone, perhaps realizing his own credit line with the studios has run thin in the two decades since he’s had a hit, is at least wise enough to give us as much eye candy as castor oil.
Gekko (a loose and funny Michael Douglas) slinks out of federal prison in 2001, unwelcomed but unbroken. The insider-trading scandal of the first film was only the beginning of his unpleasantness. As time passes and he readies a book for publication in the fateful year of 2008, he wants revenge on a former associate who helped put him in prison — the Street’s new kingpin, Bretton James (Josh Brolin).
Also he wants to repair things with his daughter (Carey Mulligan, an Oscar nominee for “An Education”), who can’t forgive him for his absence during the drug-fueled downfall of her late brother. By coincidence, his daughter’s boyfriend Jake (Shia LaBeouf) is a L’il Gekko (albeit with a green streak), a trader who also wants revenge against James for his sharky takeover of Jake’s firm, which has undergone a Lehman Brothers-grade implosion.
Stone and his screenwriters have a lot of ideas — the movie is fast-paced and loaded with story lines — but can’t quite shape the 2008 meltdown into a movie. We should be outraged about the crisis because . . . it led to the suicides of top banking officials? Sorry, incorrect. And Stone is childlike in the simplicity of his view that anyone on Wall Street can take down an enemy simply by planting a false rumor on a message board, with no consequences. Financial savants will find the movie way too facile, and yet there is too much jabber about CDOs and moral hazard for the average viewer.
The one attempt to show how a hurricane on Wall Street washes away Main Street is embodied in Jake’s mother (Susan Sarandon). She’s a caricature of a garish Lawn Guyland lady who quit nursing to be a real-estate agent and is as addicted to cheap money (loans from her son) as the big shots. But Stone can’t avoid wagging a finger in the poor woman’s face, as if her desire to better herself is what’s wrong with her, and we’re meant to cheer when she returns to nursing. Easy for Stone to say the middle class should know its place: He was born rich. His dad worked on Wall Street.
Gekko, in promoting his book, channels Stone’s contempt in a lengthy denunciation of Wall Street. Dramatizing an idea means more than just assigning a speech to a character, and anyway Gekko seems a curious choice to lash out at the Street — especially when his daughter is a lefty blogger. She should be the one explaining these points, and be more than just the girl, but Stone’s interest in female characters has always been minimal, from his “Scarface” days forward.
What will stick with most viewers is the glitzy images of Manhattan skyscrapers, the zippy Ducatis and the jittering rows of numbers indicating fortunes made, lost and regained. For all of Stone’s distaste for capital, he conjures up a vision to tempt a new generation (as “Wall Street” did, unintentionally) into the forbidden kingdom.
As with the original film — and “Paradise Lost” and “All in the Family” — the supposed villain is the one to root for, and Stone is a little more aware of this now, tasking Brolin with the heavy-duty nastiness so Douglas can loosen up. The movie is at its best when Gekko gets back into the game, with his impish smile and his perfect hair. Douglas even pivots gracefully to an emotionally resonant scene in which he tries to rebuild bridges with his daughter.
By contrast, LaBeouf is an underperforming asset, never anything but the eager pup he’s been in every movie to date. Maybe his future lies in playing the clueless straight man. When he tells Gekko all about a green scheme that’ll change the world — something about turning seawater into fuel — Gekko has the funniest, most dead-on line of the movie: “That’s smart. That’s the next bubble.”
kyle.smith@nypost.com
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