A cinematic development I hadn’t expected is Oliver Stone evolving into a director who makes movies that are fair, responsible, and forgettable. His sequel Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, with Michael Douglas returning as reptilian financier Gordon Gekko, falls squarely into all three categories.
Stone was once a media darling who won three Oscars, writing Midnight Express in 1978 and directing Platoon in 1986 and Born on the Fourth of July in 1989. Yet scandals over two movies made at the peak of his powers, JFK in 1991 and Natural Born Killers in 1994, have left Stone gun-shy.
Until JFK, the press accepted and even encouraged Kennedy assassination conspiracy-theorizing. After all, Lee Harvey Oswald’s biography, with his myriad clandestine contacts, does sound pretty fishy. (The most sensible explanation is that Oswald wanted to be part of a conspiracy but scared off his various would-be co-conspirators.)
A formidable technical feat, JFK was well-received initially, earning eight Oscar nominations. Yet rather than merely poke holes in the Warren Report, Stone, with his too-much-is-never-enough urge, mashed together two incompatible theories. He chillingly dramatized Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty’s contention that the entire military-industrial complex had mobilized its vast resources to hire (in New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison’s issues-laden imagination) some French Quarter flamers to carry out the operation. JFK eventually became a byword for everything the press despised.
After Natural Born Killers, an unfunny but mesmerizing satire about a thrill-kill couple, came out on video, it became various pointless murderers’ favorite movie. One young couple watched NBK on drugs and then randomly shot an old friend of John Grisham’s. The popular novelist sponsored a product-liability lawsuit against Stone. It went through four rounds in the courts before the maximalist director was in the clear.
Surprisingly, Stone has taken some of the criticism to heart. Thus, his recent history-inspired films have been less contrived than, say, The Social Network. Stone’s 2008 biopic about George W. Bush, W, which used mostly public utterances as private dialogue, plausibly blamed the Iraq War on the younger Bush’s Daddy Issues, something Stone knows all about.
Stone’s new movie fictionalizing 2008’s Great Crash is informative and reasonable, with the conspiracy-theorizing kept to the margins. The financial industry, Stone concludes (echoing his old-fashioned stockbroker father whose 1985 death inspired the first Wall Street), should raise capital for industry, not indulge in speculation.
Yet even the most desperate advertising copywriter wouldn’t adorn a movie ad with the quote “Informative and Reasonable!” in 72-point type. And if Oliver Stone won’t indulge in malicious speculation about Wall Street, to whom can we turn?
The new Wall Street features numerous inside jokes, such as a cameo by Charlie Sheen as Bud Fox from the original. The funniest, though, is overlooked in the credits: The screenplay is by Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff. That’s like a movie about heavy industry being written by Adam Carnegie and Stuart Rockefeller. In 1867, Solomon Loeb co-founded the genteel investment bank Kuhn, Loeb & Co., which he passed on to his son-in-law Jacob Schiff, who became the early 20th Century’s German-Jewish J.P. Morgan.
Loeb and Schiff’s script is overstuffed with plot, exposition, and commentary. Stone compounds this by letting everybody except poor Shia LaBeouf, the nice-guy nullity at the center, overact. The youngest and oldest performers are particularly shameless. As Gekko’s estranged daughter, Carey Mulligan (Oscar-nominated last year for An Education) shows off facial-muscle agility that would intimidate Jim Carrey. After a while, I stopped listening to her lines and tried mimicking her expressions in the dark. (I couldn’t.) Eli Wallach, age 94, has a blast stealing scenes as the only man on Wall Street old enough to remember the first Black October. He gleefully informs the Treasury Secretary: “It’s 1929 all over again; it’s the end of the world!”
Money Never Sleeps continues Stone’s practice of middlebrow free association, as if he were perusing Wikipedia on acid. Just as Gordon “Greed Is Good” Gekko’s name is a mashup of the lizard and Gordon Getty, once the richest man on the Forbes 400, Josh Brolin’s handsome villain is called “Bretton James,” an apparent concoction of Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase & Co. and 1944’s Bretton Woods trade conference. Similarly, Stone casts Austin Pendleton in a supporting role as the inventor of green nuclear fusion energy because he’s a dead ringer for the late television astrophysicist Carl Sagan, so you can tell right away that he’s smart about the science stuff.
These subliminal shortcuts help Stone rush us through a huge amount of material in 135 minutes without the wheels ever coming off, but an older and wiser Stone isn’t a better one.
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