Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010)
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (USA) Directed by Oliver Stone Written by Allen Loeb; Stephen Schiff Starring Michael Douglas; Shia Labeouf; Carey Mulligan; Josh Brolin; Susan Sarandon; Eli Wallach; Frank Langella; Austin Pendleton; Jason Clarke; Vanessa Ferlito
Sixty four year old Oliver Stone is like a power hitting specialist in baseball - each and every time up at bat he’s swinging for the fences. Many of his efforts over the last fifteen years have fallen short of the wall - pop ups to the outfield; some drives to the warning track, but he keeps whacking away, satisfied only with the possibility of creating big films that tackle the political, economic, and social questions of our day.
Stone’s films are, on the whole, loud and brash, his scripts unapologetically riddled with characters speechifying about philosophical life questions. There is a theatricality to them that often reaches the grand scale of opera, and the recent historic nature of much of his output provides problems with recounting these real life events in a naturalistic way, keeping up the entertainment quotient while delving into the big questions that compelled him in the first place.
When Stone gets the balance right, a kind of epic feel is often achieved that is not easily manufactured in cinema. To his credit, whether the subject matter is war; the executive office of the president; terrorism; or finance, his films are almost always about something, which is not at all a given when discussing the majority of entries emerging from the Hollywood machine. For better or worse Stone has a horse in the race most times out of the gate - he’s a student of politics, and history, posessing a seemingly insatiable intellectual curiosity, an artist who wants desperately to reach mass audiences to communicate to them his stridently held ideas about our collective state of existence within American society, and the larger world where we reside.
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is, of course, not the work of a modest filmmaker. Stone is after creating something that speaks of and for our times: no small task that. Here, he tackles our recent economic woes, concentrating, of course, on the Wall Street collapse and the scandal related to credit default swaps, hedge funds, and the failings of sub-prime mortgages and the real estate market, while touching upon ideas about the melding of green energy and commerce.
While the film is not a piece with multiple story lines akin to something like Babel, in its own way it bites off just as much. And by treating Gordon Gekko’s return to public life (he’s written a book) following a five year court battle, an eight year prison stay, and an additional seven years of imposed exile from the financial industry with the kind of utmost seriousness and sense of importance one would expect from Stone, he sets up the plot as a kind of archetypal morality play that is as every bit in love with its own sweep as the original. Thankfully, however, Stone is one of the few filmmakers with the ego, aplomb, cajones, and overall chops to pull off something of this size and scope. Big, wide reaching dramas are ultimately far more unwieldy than the expensive, technically complicated comic book superhero entrees, actioners, and sci-fi/fantasy sagas that make up so much of what we see in American theaters, mainly because they must combine high production value with a logical, coherent story containing emotionally true scenes that rise to the high stakes of the film without going over the top.
Sequels, with a few notable exceptions (Godfather II; Before Sunset), almost always suffer from being severely anti-climactic - attempts to recapture what made (in some cases) the first one so good often leading to an obvious lack of originality and the feeling of being served a warmed over meal. Stone manages to make real recent history work in his favor, allowing the story (a solid script by Allen Loeb and Stephen Schiff) to arise out of its shadow. A sequel to a tale as big as the original needed something major and compelling at its center/backdrop/core and Stone was smart and savvy enough to realize that the world economic crisis was a set of circumstances that could support a second film.
Stone does well with a cast led by the ageless (though currently sick) Michael Douglas (reprising the reptilian Gordon Gekko role), and two good young actors in Carey Mulligan (as daughter Winnie Gekko) and Shia Labeouf (as boyfriend/fiancee Jake Moore). This is the young/young looking Labeouf’s best role to date, and the gifted Mulligan keeps the momentum rolling from her exceptional Oscar nominated work in An Education (she also appears in Never Let Me Go, currently in theaters). The supporting players include Susan Sarandon, who has an underwritten role as Jake’s Jewish, Long Island Mom; Josh Brolin as bad guy/hot shot billionaire Bretton James; ninety four year old Eli Wallach as Jules Steinhardt; and seventy two year old Frank Langella, in a nice turn, as Jake’s mentor Louis Zabel.
Shot by the supremely talented Diego Prieto, Stone makes great use of the New York skyline, employing an abundance of aerial shots and views through the windows of hi-rise apartments to give us a taste of the city, though there are times when the visuals are perhaps a little too busy. Stone includes any number of mesmerizing graphics and charts to (over) explain the already distilled scientific and economic concepts put forth, using dissolves and other transitional devices to continue fluidly driving the momentum. And still, while, for instance, the motorcycle race that takes place between Jake and Bretton is telegraphed and more than a little cliche, it is also crisply filmed with an intensity befitting the speed and danger of the action on display.
This film is not on par with the original, and Laboeuf ultimately proves less compelling and believable than his 1987 counterpart, young Charlie Sheen (who returns in a off-puttingly glib cameo as Bud Fox), but as far as sequels go this one is still among the best ever made.