Directed by: Oliver Stone
Starring: Michael Douglas, Shia Lebeouf, Carrie Mulligan, Josh Brolin, Frank Langella
Oliver Stone's 1987 Wall Street was intended as a cautionary tale about the self-defeating effects of greed. The opposite effect happened. Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas in his Oscar-winning role) became a cult figure and a reason why many young men and women went to work on Wall Street. The superficial lust for money and possessions became a lure. Any cautions Stone and Douglas intended were thrown to the winds. 23 years later comes Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps in which Gordon Gekko is a pariah in the very same economic world guys like him helped create . It's ironic how Gekko becomes the voice of reason against an impending economic disaster based on speculation and mountains of bad debt.
As the film opens, Gekko is released from prison after an eight-year prison sentence for various illegal activities in pursuit of the dollar. He is far from the slick charmer from the late 80's. He is gray-haired, scruffy, and alone. No one is there to greet him, certainly not his estranged daughter Winnie (Mulligan) who blames him for her brother's death and the destruction of her family. We soon meet Winnie, who runs a blog website and lives with Wall Street broker Jacob Moore (Lebeouf). They are a happy couple until the brokerage firm he works for is sold to Wall Street shark Bretton James (Brolin) and the firm's founder (and Jacob's mentor) commits suicide.
It is at this point that a vengeful Moore seeks out Gekko, who is now a best-selling author condemning today's market practices. Gekko, wishing to reconcile with his daughter, agrees to help Moore bring down James for reasons of his own, which are made clear later on. It is at this point that Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps becomes a more human drama. The participants, with the exception of Brolin's James, are three-dimensional, while Brolin plays James as the type of charmless, cold rat perhaps Stone intended Gekko to be in the first movie.
I won't reveal any more plot points because a.) it would be mean and b.) doing so would take another 25 paragraphs. But I will discuss the fact that this is an Oliver Stone film in which smaller human truths are more pronounced than larger, broader points about the economy. The original Wall Street comprised its drama with broad strokes while here the quieter, melodramatic aspects are more on display. It is a very un-Stone-like approach, but I'll be damned if it didn't work.
Douglas' Gekko here is smart, ruthless in his own way, but wise and more fallible. While in jail, he lost everything including his family, which eats at him more than you would think. In the original Wall Street, Gekko's family was an afterthought. But after losing so much time, what's left of his family is now in the forefront of his mind, but yet... I also liked Lebeouf here. If you think he is simply a latter-day Bud Fox, then you would be incorrect. Lebeouf is especially strong in his unwillingness to be corrupted.
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps works as a commentary on the current economic crisis and works even better on the human level. If Stone had simply made another Wall Street circa 20 years later, then what would've been the point? Moore comments, "The definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing over and over, expecting different results." I'm glad Stone and company didn't follow that definition.
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