Now that we’re all living in shoe-boxes trading scrap metal as currency it’s easy to look at the last financial meltdown and blame _______. Whether you fill that blank with an abstract idea such as ‘greed,’ technical jargon like ‘over leveraged credit default swap’ or with the timeless classic ‘Jews’ I’d have to disagree. I think it was Gordon Gekko.
Oliver Stone’s 1987 Wall Street is a classic. The film worked for three reasons. First, Oliver Stone’s father worked wall street, giving little Olly a level of insight matched only by his Vietnam trilogy. Second, every character fit a stock – but was used in such a way our expectation helped flush out plot points in a relatively complicated, and before then unexplored (on film) niche of enterprise. And third, Michael Douglas played Satan in pinstripes and it was fuxing perfect. I don’t think any character from the 80s had such a lasting effect on the American culture. And to think John Hughes had nothing to do with him.
Gordon Gekko is a villain in a hero story. He represents corruption and is himself the test of the protagonist, Budd Fox. But there is something twisted about his following, something I cannot say about any villain from any era. People don’t want to be Darth Vader, but people want to be Gordon Gekko. Nobody wants to be Budd Fox. By his own admittance Stone feels guilty for making Gekko so f*cking cool. During research for Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps he ran into more than one cutthroat trader who cited Gekko as their personal hero. Imagine how utterly fucked our world would be if villain worship was universal. It spits in the face of how anthropology assumes story and myth play into the history of human psyche. Joseph Cambell will have to posthumously revise A Hero With a Thousand Faces to say we are drawn to story because, as benevolent creatures, we desire to see good triumph over evil, asterisks, except for the solitary case of Gordon Gekko. What does this say about us? You can have total mastery of The Force at your disposal but it still wouldn't corrupt you like hundreds of millions of dollars. Is GG the exception that proves the rule?
So Gekko’s back in Wall Street: Money Never Peeps. The plot follows young trader Jake Moore (Shia LeBeouf) as he tries to maintain a relationship with Gekko’s daughter Winnie (Carey Mulligan) while keeping he and his mother (Susan Sarandon) solvent during the recent economic collapse. Gekko wants to reconnect with Winnie despite her hatred of him and uses Jake to get close. All the while another Gekkoesque tycoon, Bretton James (Josh Brolin) runs around stuffing his thumb in everyone’s asshole. And all of this is revealed in the first few minutes, so I haven’t ruined anything.
The plot is predictable, but the execution is very good. It’s not perfect, and there are some moments when I felt we were skating on thin ice (Ollllllly!) but this is mostly due to cheap tricks used to fill Gekko’s backstory in for those who didn’t see first film. There are some cameos I could have gone without. These are made more inappropriate by their proximity to really excellent scenes. I feel Josh Brolin really stood out as Bretton James. He doesn’t feel as grand as Gekko did in Wall Street. But given the first film’s legacy among traders it’s easy to see how James is trying to be Gekko, and though he surpasses Gekko's sleaziness, one can assume the climate has grown to eclipse the man who made 'greed is good' fashionable in the first place. Brolin brings in just enough Bond-villain to draw a distinction between greedy and downright criminal. That’s important because every character, with the exception of Gekko’s daughter (who is already flush with cash) is from the Enron 'I must poop in gold toilets' school of greedy.
Jake and Winnie’s relationship feels real (probably because they fux in real life). It’s refreshing to see Shia act with someone who can actually act. I know it’s trendy for dudes my age to call Shia LeBeouf a pussy for having a cajun name, but I am pretty sure that’s jealousy because he’s our age and utterly slaying Hollywood. Whenever I bring this up people ask ‘but did you every see Even Stevens?’ No. I understand this was something on the Disney channel. At 14 I’d outgrown the taste of corporate mouse-cock and thinly veiled Christian bullshit peddled to middle America like mayonnaise sandwiches and health benefits of salt, so I didn’t watch the Disney Channel. I smoked weed and had my dad drive me to Cyprus Hill concerts. Seriously.
LeBeouf is basically a more ‘acty’ Harrison Ford, so if you hate him you’re going to have a REALLY hard time seeing movies for the next twenty-five years. All he’s got to do is not kill someone while high and he’s pretty much golden.
But Wall Street: Money Needs it Deep is good. It’s good because acting and decent writing overcome the gimmick of sequel. Walking out of the theater I found it to be OK, but after three days I find myself entertained just thinking about scenes, lines, and choices I liked. It all seems very scattered at first, especially the animations that transition a few of the trading sequences, but these are easily forgiven. If anything, I wanted to see more Wall Street action, more greedy people shouting into phones, more lingo, more ties getting undone, more cursing about how ‘fucked the Nikkei is,’ and more Long Island excess, but the movie was already pushing two hours and Stone’s primary responsibility is ironically, poetically, always, to make the studio some fucking money.
First!
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