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| Wall Street |
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  (9/10)
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Runtime: 125 |
| Public Rating: 8.77 (30 votes) |
Director: Oliver Stone |
MPAA Rating:  |
| Genre: Drama |
Year: 1987 |
| Writer(s): Stanley Weiser & Oliver Stone |
| Distributor: 1 |
| Reviewed by: Friday and Saturday Night Critic |
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Sure, a lot of it is cliché now. But it takes a special kind of film to actually invent a cliché, and that’s the potency of Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street.” To this day, people actually talk about the insatiably avaricious Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas in his Oscar-winning performance) as if he were a real person. Slicked hair, thousand-dollar suits, suspenders, and an absolute absence of compassion, Gekko is not just a walking, talking embodiment of the explosion of greed that came over the stock market in the mid-1980s. He is all our fears of men whose business is money and nothing but money. I guarantee you plenty of people who haven’t even seen “Wall Street” still think of him when they are asked to imagine day traders and power brokers.
As the central figure of “Wall Street,” Gekko is the purest, most undiluted product of capitalism, untainted by morality or anything else that stands in the way of the free market. In a Darwinian sense, his environment has honed him perfectly, discarding all the fat and excess body parts, and he is more perfectly suited for his surroundings than all the creatures too timid or unwilling to leave behind their unnecessary luggage. He is also surprisingly charming, in a smooth, reptilian sort of way, but he is not the dynamic character of “Wall Street.” That role belongs to a low-level stock broker named Bud Fox, who is played by Charlie Sheen as a twentysomething, starry-eyed adolescent just waiting to be taken advantage of. Bud is enamored with consumption and idolizes Gekko, but he has nothing worth selling to Gekko and there’s nothing special about him. Gekko sees right through him, but he also sees that Bud is a little bit of a blank: he has a personality but has yet to develop any true character, and this makes him as deliciously corruptible as any company Gekko is waiting to consume.
The arc is familiar but it’s used again and again because it’s such a good one. Like Bud Fox, we see someone we think we want to be—in this case Gordon Gekko—and as we enter his world we find out what a sham he is. Bud gets all the stuff—the apartment, the clothes, the wine—and he even gets the girl. She’s an art dealer (Daryl Hannah) from Gekko’s circle, as addicted to high, comfortable living as any junkie is addicted to his poison. Stone takes his two protagonists in and out of the offices where sweaty men with their ties undone and their sleeves rolled up determine the fate of entire companies, with hundreds of thousands of employees. Bud’s initiation also includes some skirting of the law, as he and Gekko dabble in insider trading and industrial espionage. The movie is surprisingly aggressive and athletic, considering how boring it could have been and how much of it is comprised of figures, ledgers, and phone calls.
Everything looks authentic, from the cavernous expanse of Gekko’s office to the drab, cubicle fluorescence where we first find Bud, and Stone was even allowed to film on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange during trading hours. The movie has time for clever details, like when Bud’s art dealer girlfriend makes fun of his crappy little apartment’s exposed brick wall, and then she decorates their $950,000 high rise condo with faux exposed brick and fashionably decaying furniture. “Wall Street” has aged surprisingly well, which is no small feat for a movie from the cheese-laden 1980s. All the outdated technology—giant cell phones, monochrome computer screens, and stock tickers that are divided into eighths instead of tenths—reminds us what a Sisyphusian chore it is to keep up with what passes for wealth. So much of what “Wall Street’s” characters desire is kind of a joke now, as so much of what we long for will one day seem ridiculous. Bud Fox’s job hardly exists anymore; most savvy investors buy their stocks or mutual funds directly off the internet without having to pay someone like him to make purchases for them.
Both “Wall Street” and “Platoon,” Stone’s Vietnam war epic made the year before, star Charlie Sheen as an on-screen stand-in for Stone himself. In “Wall Street’s” DVD commentary, Stone explains that as a young man he could have gone to Wall Street or Vietnam. He chose Vietnam and part of his impetus for making “Wall Street” was to explore what would have happened if he had gone down the road not taken. The movie’s other direct ancestor, according to Stone, is his screenplay for the 1983 “Scarface,” about a drug dealer who sells all his loyalties and intimacies to become rich beyond his wildest dreams, and sadder and more joyless than he could have ever imagined.
In the DVD commentary Stone is surprisingly and casually candid about his dissatisfaction with Sheen and Hannah. The first, he claims, was too spaced out by “Platoon’s” success at the Oscars to give “Wall Street” the attention it deserves, and the second was too much at heart a hippie to get her head around a character so materialistic. Sheen’s performance is solid, if not as inspired as Douglas’, but it sometimes hard to take him seriously because he was so brilliant—yes, brilliant—in the “Hot Shots!” films. There are several moments in “Wall Street” when I wondered if I was supposed to be laughing at him or not; I just about busted a gut when Bud used the phrase “everybody’s doing it” to try to convince a lawyer to take part in some shady transactions.
The movie is filled with fathers for Bud. His figurative fathers include Gekko, of course, and his old-school employer at his brokerage firm (Hal Holbrook), who dispenses tried-and-true paradigms that lack the appeal of Gekko’s Machiavellian get-rich-quick schemes. Bud is also joined by his biological father, played by Charlie Sheen’s real father Martin. He is a pro-labor machinist who has been working for the same airline for most of his adult life, and although that airline’s management is struggling he is willing to stick with it out of loyalty. While the big fight between the characters played by Charlie Sheen and Daryl Hannah is the most awkward scene in the movie, the few moments shared by Martin Sheen and Michael Douglas are so well-played that they become an iconic battle between the philosophies of the left and the right.
Some of “Wall Street’s” final act may seem a little Capra-esque, as the unions gang up to show the capitalist a thing or two. My only other complaint is the same half-complaint I made about “Better Luck Tomorrow:” both movies involve crime, and are still very good, but in the two cases I got the feeling that equally good, if not better movies could be made with the same characters and the same actors, but no criminal element. That’s the mystery of capitalism, as embodied by Gordon Gekko, that philosophy we love to hate and hate to love. It is a heartless, morally neutral, and entirely secular system that not only rewards individuals who are greedy but which financially rewards the entire society to which those greedy and successful individuals belong. Our pocketbooks, schools, bellies, and even charities are filled to abundance by the Gordon Gekkos of the world—but what if, in actually, they aren’t breaking any laws?
The Gekkos of the world may produce nothing, but their contribution to society is to keep every publicly-traded company running at maximum efficiency, otherwise they swoop in and destroy it as punishment for dragging down the economy. What if his ilk does not break the law, but is simply disgustingly greedy and then smug about it? We wish the Gekkos were evil, sometimes out of envy, sometimes out of the guilt of knowing that ferocious animal competition is the basis of human culture, and always has been. Maybe the greatest success of capitalism is that it puts our generation’s tyrannical scum behind desks instead of behind spears or chariots.
Finished April 1, 2004
Copyright © 2004 Friday & Saturday Night
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 Printable Version
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Starring Michael Douglas, Charlie Sheen, Martin Sheen, Daryl Hannah, Hal Holbrook, James Spader, Sean Young, and Terence Stamp
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