Cast of wall street money never sleeps, Wall Street is a mess, a morass, a snarl of contradictions large and small — a magnet for envy and indignation, fear and worship. Why should “Wall Street” be any different?
The full title of Oliver Stone’s hectic new chapter in the Gordon Gekko cycle — a conventional sequel that is also a corrective, a parody and a sly act of auto-homage — is “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” and the movie has an insomniac restlessness that is by turns thrilling and enervating. It is as volatile as the Dow Jones on a day of seesaw, high-volume trading, as Mr. Stone and the screenwriters (Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff) scramble to capture the cacophonous cultural rhythms of right now, not so long ago and some vaguely recollected bygone age when things were different.
Evoking most directly those clammy, vertiginous weeks in the late summer and early fall of 2008, when the much-prophesied Crisis of Capitalism appeared to be at hand, “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” displays a grandiose ambition appropriate to its subject. In other words, Mr. Stone, never much for modesty, subtlety or the careful calculation of risk, has written a much bigger check than he could ever hope to cash.
The real story of modern financial calamity is so enormous, so intricate and so confusing that any fictional distillation of it is likely to fall short and ring false, and even casual readers of “The Big Short” by Michael Lewis or the business section of The New York Times will find factual nits to pick with the new “Wall Street.” But there are also moments of astonishing insight, and a sweeping sense of moral drama that feels true in spite of inaccuracies and implausibilities. This movie is by turns brilliant and dumb, naïve and wise, nowhere near good enough and something close to great.
If the film were a college course it would be Economics for Poets. Money is not really Mr. Stone’s theme. In itself it is too abstract, too cold and impersonal for his romantic, Hollywood-Shakespearean sensibility. His best movies, the first “Wall Street” among them, are preoccupied with the more primal matter of power and its corollaries — honor, loyalty, hubris and disgrace.
In the person of Gordon Gekko, played both times with leonine bombast and reptilian cunning by Michael Douglas, Mr. Stone has conceived one of the definitive heroic villains of modern pop culture. John Milton, a dutiful Christian seeking to justify the ways of God to men back in the 17th century, made Satan the most vivid and interesting character in “Paradise Lost,” so much so that, according to William Blake, Milton was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it.”
Similarly, Mr. Stone, a heterodox, occasionally hyperbolic leftist, has conjured a capitalist bad guy whose dynamism and charisma — whose relish at the sheer, ruthless fun of predation — leaves a much deeper impression than his duplicity or his greed. Back in 1987, “Wall Street” may have been intended as a cautionary tale, but it has also always been an irresistible advertisement for the excess it condemns.
The full title of Oliver Stone’s hectic new chapter in the Gordon Gekko cycle — a conventional sequel that is also a corrective, a parody and a sly act of auto-homage — is “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” and the movie has an insomniac restlessness that is by turns thrilling and enervating. It is as volatile as the Dow Jones on a day of seesaw, high-volume trading, as Mr. Stone and the screenwriters (Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff) scramble to capture the cacophonous cultural rhythms of right now, not so long ago and some vaguely recollected bygone age when things were different.
Evoking most directly those clammy, vertiginous weeks in the late summer and early fall of 2008, when the much-prophesied Crisis of Capitalism appeared to be at hand, “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” displays a grandiose ambition appropriate to its subject. In other words, Mr. Stone, never much for modesty, subtlety or the careful calculation of risk, has written a much bigger check than he could ever hope to cash.
The real story of modern financial calamity is so enormous, so intricate and so confusing that any fictional distillation of it is likely to fall short and ring false, and even casual readers of “The Big Short” by Michael Lewis or the business section of The New York Times will find factual nits to pick with the new “Wall Street.” But there are also moments of astonishing insight, and a sweeping sense of moral drama that feels true in spite of inaccuracies and implausibilities. This movie is by turns brilliant and dumb, naïve and wise, nowhere near good enough and something close to great.
If the film were a college course it would be Economics for Poets. Money is not really Mr. Stone’s theme. In itself it is too abstract, too cold and impersonal for his romantic, Hollywood-Shakespearean sensibility. His best movies, the first “Wall Street” among them, are preoccupied with the more primal matter of power and its corollaries — honor, loyalty, hubris and disgrace.
In the person of Gordon Gekko, played both times with leonine bombast and reptilian cunning by Michael Douglas, Mr. Stone has conceived one of the definitive heroic villains of modern pop culture. John Milton, a dutiful Christian seeking to justify the ways of God to men back in the 17th century, made Satan the most vivid and interesting character in “Paradise Lost,” so much so that, according to William Blake, Milton was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it.”
Similarly, Mr. Stone, a heterodox, occasionally hyperbolic leftist, has conjured a capitalist bad guy whose dynamism and charisma — whose relish at the sheer, ruthless fun of predation — leaves a much deeper impression than his duplicity or his greed. Back in 1987, “Wall Street” may have been intended as a cautionary tale, but it has also always been an irresistible advertisement for the excess it condemns.
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