Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (4/5 Stars) October 1, 2010

Oliver Stone: Angry no more
In 1978 a movie came out called ‘Midnight Express.’ It told the true story of Billy Hayes, a young American who had attempted to smuggle a small amount of hashish out of Turkey in order to fund his university studies. It was a stupid thing to do and he was caught and sentenced to a draconian four years in a hellish Turkish prison. In his final year, Hayes appealed only to be resentenced to an astounding 20 more years. The laws had changed in the meantime and the Turkish Constitution had no ex post facto provision. What followed was one of the most incredible scenes I have ever seen in a movie. The Young American is given a chance to speak to the court at the end of his trial. He has apparently given his fate much thought and he speaks of justice and mercy with much eloquence and intelligence. But as he gets to the end of the speech, he can’t help himself; he also has this to say: “For a nation of pigs, it sure is funny that you don’t eat them. Christ forgave the bastards, but I cannot! I hate! I hate you! I hate your country! And I hate your people! And I fuck your sons and daughters because they’re pigs! You’re all pigs!” The world of cinema had just witnessed the debut of a great new talent. It was the writer Oliver Stone and come Oscar night he would holding a golden statuette for the first screenplay he had ever written. 


If we assume that Hatred is an emotion that arises from ignorance, than it must follow that Education has a soothing effect on such strong emotion. Correctly done, education should promote understanding, which should naturally lead to empathy and wisdom. Thus it can be assumed (and frequently witnessed) that Angry People are usually inarticulate, wild, and plainly mistaken. But every once in awhile there comes a person who can intelligently articulate such strong emotion. They have been educated. They certainly have a vague notion that anger is not the mature response. But they cannot help themselves. They have been Hurt and they Hate too much. 

Oliver Stone was raised in a conservative Republican family. His father was a stockbroker. When Vietnam broke out, Oliver didn’t wait to be drafted. He signed up for the Army because he wanted to serve his country. He completed two tours of duty in Vietnam and there something bad must have happened. From then on he was a fire-breathing liberal, he moved to New York, and he started making movies that all had a common thread in them. Almost all of them were about young men who were betrayed and/or had rejected their father figures or country (Scarface, Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, The Doors, JFK) Perhaps the most formidable of all of Stone’s dastardly fathers was Gordon Gekko, the investment banker played by in an Oscar-winning role by Michael Douglas in the original Wall Street (1987). He was brilliant, ruthless, and merciless. He broke companies not because he wanted the money because he liked breaking people, dominating them and wringing out the weak. He glorified himself as the pique of evolution and justified his treatment of others as a sort of natural selection. The point of the game is to beat the other guy, right? Well, then a hostile takeover of a business that ends up in the liquidation of thousands of employees but garners the maximum possible return is not simply a means to greed; it is the point in and of itself. The more people you push around, the bigger the victory. Wall Street wasn’t about greedy people. It was about assholes. 
That sort of thing is pretty much absent in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. There aren’t any real jerks in this movie. Gekko gets out of prison, but is now against the system, not for it (He just wrote a book, Is Greed Good?). His new protégé’s, played by Shia Lebouf, main goal is to marry Gekko’s daughter and finance a green energy company. This contrasts greatly with Bud Fox in the original who wanted to be a player in the game and lusted after a glamorous gold-digger. There aren’t any real victims in this movie either. The biggest injustice is the failure of a big bank and the suicide of its CEO, played by Frank Langella. This plot point draws a close parallel to the fall of Bear Stearns in real life. But who would think of the financial collapse of 2008 and think that the biggest victim was the CEO of Bear Sterns. The original Wall Street had an ordinary victim. He was Fox’s father and Gekko got him fired in a hostile takeover. This movie never really leaves Manhattan. We don’t see any of the catastrophic results of a decade of very wrong banking practices. There is no populist rage. All we have is Gekko wisely musing about bubbles from a historical perspective. Yeah, I know about the Dutch tulips. We think its funny now sure, but we forget that it completely ruined lives back then like every other bubble has done since. (It is actually kind of amazing how many people in this movie declare that they don’t care about the money. I suspect it is really because they are all well off and don’t have to.) 
The movie does do a very good job of not dumbing anything down. We hear technical language about credit default swaps, short sales, stock rising and falling etc. Lebouf at one point even takes the time to explain his fusion energy project that captures energy from seawater (He gets it right too. I studied that in high school Academic Decathlon). Then there are several scenes that take us into the boardrooms of the Federal Reserve during the point in the crisis where the bankers stared into the abyss and finally asked the government to bail them out. These seem to be about right too, but they are distracting because they take place in a fictional movie. Descriptions of these historic moments really ought to be in a documentary. I kept wondering if they got it right. 
Of course the big question is whether prison actually had any impact on Gekko’s ruthless personality and whether this father figure, so vilified in the original, would be any different this time around. He is, more or less. The new Oliver Stone is older and wiser and his villains now are more often “mixed bags” as Gekko relates himself to at the movie’s end. I liked particularly how Stone coaxed Gekko over to the good side in ways that weren’t righteous or melodramatic. He presents the choice as a business decision with Gekko’s most important asset being time. It makes sense even if you intend on remaining a greedy bastard. If anything else, this movie should not inspire a generation of jerks like the last one did. That happens when you refuse to tell stories about those types of people.
In the last half of Stone’s career, he stopped telling stories about betrayed youth and started telling stories about tragic leaders (Nixon, Any Given Sunday, Alexander, W). Perhaps it as his way of trying to understand that which he has had a lifelong distrust of. The movies are sad and the subjects are flawed but Stone is more empathetic than judgmental of the old graying patriarchs. One movie in particular, World Trade Center, was striking for its whole-hearted patriotism. Perhaps with that movie he had finally forgiven his country. And with Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, with its wiser more sympathetic Gekko, perhaps Stone has finally forgiven his father. There very well may be a movie out there someday that portrays exactly how we felt about the financial crisis, but it won’t be made by Oliver Stone. He is angry no more. Perhaps he should start making comedies. I wonder what an Oliver Stone comedy would look like.

W. 10/19/08

"Who is in charge here?" yells Dubya to his senior staff. Months have passed in the Iraq war and no weapons of mass destruction have been found. "What I want to know is who here is in charge of finding those damn weapons?" pleads Dubya. Everyone looks around and starts blaming everyone else. That's when it struck me. What an ironic question for the leader of the free world to posit? The answer of course should be Dubya, but he isn't (even though he keeps on emphatically stating he is) and as this movie points out is that Dubya never was. He is a hollow man, headpiece filled with straw. Sort of like a post turtle. What's a post turtle? Well a post turtle is a turtle sitting on a post. You know it didn't get up there on it's own. It has no reason for being there. It doesn't know what to do while it's up there. And you just wonder what kind of idiot put it up there to begin with. 
Oliver takes us through the story of Bush before he became President of the United States. You probably didn't know much of this. He was an alcoholic struggling under the shadow of his father. He got legacied into Yale and Harvard business school. He went through several jobs, doing poorly in all of them. He knocked up a girl and was once sent to prison. His early story basically consists of his father getting him out of mess after mess. Never does Dubya appear grateful for his many second chances. He is a spoiled rich kid with an air of arrogance and extreme resentment toward others for his own limitations. 
But because of his lineage he is swept up by the likes of Karl Rove and Dick Cheney who see an opportunity to exchange their ideology for the face time and charisma of a Bush. The exchanges in this movie probe to the real depths of why Bush does what he does. He gets lectured, informed, and at times even told what to say and how to act by Rove and Cheney. He may do exactly as they ask, but he still takes credit for all the decisions he makes to do exactly what they say. What an incredible delusion. 
There is an especially telling scene at a press conference (This actually happened apparently) where Bush is asked what mistakes he's made and what he has learned from them. He's completely speechless and he should be. How can you learn from mistakes when your Daddy has been solving them for you all your life? How can you take responsibility when nothing you have done was your idea in the first place? If God called you to be president, how could you possibly do a bad job? 
Oliver Stone's portrayal of Bush is truly a sympathetic one. He brings us through the story with sincerity and respect toward the subject matter. (If the story of Bush is a bit of a tragedy and the man comes off as not too great that's because he wasn't. The last eight years can attest to that.) Unfortunately this story may be a little too sympathetic, at least for an Oliver Stone film. As a tremendous Oliver Stone fan I expect a little something more from his movies. I expect him to blow the top off his films, to see something truly passionate and stimulating in a degree completely lacking in lesser films. I'd hate to be one of those critics to demand that a director make films like he made them twenty years ago, but that is what I come to expect from him. Oliver Stone has changed. One noticeable area is the energy level of this film. This is most apparent in the soundtrack. When a director decides to play a dainty version of "The Yellow Rose of Texas" as the backdrop to thee 'Shock and Awe' bombing of Baghdad you know he's lost his hardcore edge. When he transitions his scenes with a slow fade to black and a slow fade to a different scene he has deliberately slowed the movie down. When Oliver Stone made earlier biopics he entered scenes into those movies that didn't take place in real life but helped the viewer understand the emotions behind the story. (A great example is the wheelchair fight in 'Born on the 4th of July.' I know that didn't happen, but it is the best part of the movie.) Here he seems to have bowed down to the fact that he was making a very controversial film. I was taken aback by the risks he didn't take than by the ones he did. I have never seen an Oliver Stone film till now that felt like the director got cold feet. He refrains from any direct political stance, any hard line point, or any pointed judgment. The tone was muted. It was a bit disappointing. I truly believe that George W. Bush deserved a movie by Oliver Stone. Now I would say he deserves a movie by Oliver Stone twenty years ago. 
The acting is superb although the script refrains from giving anyone a truly stand out performance. James Cromwell is great as the elder Bush. Toby Jones is a very good Karl Rove. Richard Dreyfuss plays a fine Dick Cheney. Josh Brolin does a very good job as President Bush. I liked him more as Bush than I liked Will Ferrel, Frank Caliendo, or Bush as Bush. The one weird performance was Thandie Newton playing Condoleeza Rice. Now I've never really heard her speak, but Thandie, in this movie, portrays her as a yes-man brown nose stuck with down syndrome. It's particularly weird. This movie, I'd say, is harder on Rice than anybody else. Colin Powell comes off looking like a genius by the way. He was the only person in the room who knew what he was talking about when it came to Iraq. Odd it is that he would be the first one fired.

World Trade Center 10/27/06

I have always been an Oliver Stone fan, from the first time I watched Platoon and JFK. After seeing those I quickly raided Blockbuster of everything Oliver Stone: Wall Street, Midnight Express, Scarface, Nixon, Natural Born Killers. Ive even seen Any Given Sunday and somewhat like Alexander. This movie is so different from the rest of those movies. So different.
There was somewhat a consensus when this movie was first mentioned that it shouldnt be made. It was too early and please anybody but Oliver Stone. A gifted filmmaker yes, but his works are great thrillers that include angry monologues, sensationalist spectacles, and controversial topics. How can that type of filmmaker be trusted with September 11th. Most people thought it couldnt. I can truly say Oliver has proved everyone wrong.
This movies main feeling isnt fear or anger or pathos of any kind. What permeates this movie is love. Its a whole big fat basket of good American apple pie and Jesus love. He doesnt show planes hitting the towers, he doesnt mention terrorists at all. He limits the movies view toward those that responded to the attacks with only the desire to help. The most cynical piece of language uttered is the word "bastards." This is said by a cop in Sheboygan, Wisconsin who afterwards took his whole company to New York, set up a barbeque at ground zero, and fed everyone.
Nicolas Cages performance is also a bit of a triumph. It probably wasnt easy creating a character who doesnt move for that last hour and a half of the film. 
I assume that every character in this film is an actual person. That makes me proud to be an American. I felt proud when the cops stepped forward to go into the building and try to save some of the people even though the sight of the fire was especially frightening. There is also a great scene in which Jimeno is carted out of the hole and there is a great line of firemen and cops there to help move him quickly and safely to the hospital. This is the type of goodness that moves people. I would guess that most people who cry at this movie are probably doing so because they are touched by the charity of those involved in the aftermath not because of the horrible acts that occured beforehand.