Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
9/25/10
Much has been written about
the tragic demise of the drama as a viable box office attraction, which
has marginalized it to the same low-budget production level as horror movies.
Where this has been most tragic is for the great dramatic filmmakers of
the time when you really could dominate the box office with a movie that
said yes to grown-ups with moral conundrums and no to giant robots.
Accustomed to working on expensive productions with elite talent, they
are asked to adapt or die. So it is that Oliver Stone, once the mighty
auteur of blockbusters like Platoon and Born on the 4th of July,
now finds himself in a virtually for-hire position on a sequel to his own
iconic hit Wall Street on which he doesn't even share screenplay
credit. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is very much
a committee product, swishing around a half-dozen ideas for an interesting
return of Michael Douglas' iconic Gordon Gekko but never really deciding
which one to go with. With Douglas back in fine form, joined by strong
performances by Shia LaBeouf and Josh Brolin, Money Never Sleeps
remains interesting for most of its running time without ever generating
much in the way of dramatic momentum. Then, when it seems to have
run its course, the film just keeps going and going and going, reversing,
revising and copping out until closing moments that are almost embarrassing
in their desperation to sell tickets. Too bad, because its ambition
to dramatize the forces the led to the 2008 Wall Street collapse is a noble
one. But sober drama and squishy soap opera don't mix well, and this
Wall Street comes off as more an apology for the financial sector than
a damning of it.
The year is 2008, seven years
since insider trader Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) was released from prison.
He's promoting a book in which he predicts the doom of the high-flying
economy when he's approached by investment banker Jake Moore (Shia LaBeouf),
the fiance of his estranged daughter Winnie (Carey Mulligan). Jake's
interested in putting her family back together, but he's also got reason
to want Gekko's advice. His mentor Louis Zabel (Frank Langella) has
killed himself after his bank's value collapsed under the machinations
of Bretton James (Josh Brolin). James is the same former Gekko associate
whose tips helped put him away, and Gordon is happy to help dig up information
on his misdeeds. Meanwhile, Jake takes his own revenge, spreading
false rumors that cause James' bank, where he hopes to succeed aging chairman
Jules Steinhardt (Eli Wallach), to suffer over a hundred million in losses.
But James isn't mad, he's impressed, and asks Jake to come work for him.
Jake brings with him a pet project, hoping to nurture a fusion energy project
until it makes him a fortune, and it seems to be just what some visiting
Chinese investors are looking for. But Winnie advises him that he
can't trust men like her father, and both Gekko and James have angles to
play as the financial bubble prepares to burst.
As viewers of Michael Moore's
far more effective Greed is Not Good screed Capitalism:
A Love Story will recall, the biggest reason derivatives and their
money-stealing brethren prosper is because no more than a handful of Wall
Street wizes even really know what they are. As such, the machinations
of the billionaires who flew high while we deluded ourselves that we too
could ride refinancing the rising “value” of our homes into free money
don't exactly make for electrifying cinema. Perhaps if, like Moore,
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps was focused on exposing their
schemes, it would have more pop, but the script by Stephen Schiff and licensed
stock broker Allan Loeb isn't really focused on anything. You've
got the Gekko family drama, the “Greed or Good?” relationship between Gekko
and Jake, Jake's quest for revenge against James, the fall of Jake's mother's
(Susan Sarandon) Realtor business, Dr. Masters (Austin Pendleton) and his
fusion energy experiments, and Jake and Winnie's romance all fighting for
screen time. This limits every one of these threads to being subplots,
and the movie putters along keeping all the plates spinning but never really
catching fire.
It's the stars who most kept
my interest. Everybody's here to see Douglas reprise his most famous
role, and making Gordon Gekko a wily outsider brings out the best in the
charismatically sinister Oscar winner. He lives large, quips hilariously
and generally surfs the razor's edge of an “is he or isn't he?” role like
a champion. Pity he's not on screen more, but then, nobody really
is. LaBeouf responds to the challenge of his weightiest dramatic
role to date with an impressively determined performance and never seems
outclassed by actors who've never called Optimus Prime their friend.
While he and Mulligan don't really strike sparks, his early scenes with
Langella are pivotal, establishing Jake as a guy who actually does care
about people and not just dollar signs. Brolin, who gave his career-best
performance in Stone's W., perfectly underplays the
soulless man whose answer to the question of how much money he'd need to
retire is “more”. I also liked Sarandon, who's tasked with representing
the financial meltdown's affect on the average person and enters into that
fugue of self-delusion she plays better than anybody while trying to prop
up the Realty business that was going to mean she didn't have to have a
boss anymore. But, truth be told, there are more poor performances
in small roles than you expect from a Stone movie. There's no point
singling any of them out, but several actors who appeared in only one or
two scenes grated on me with less than professional work. I expect
better from the elite actor's director of his day, but, honestly, even
the esteemed Wallach and Mulligan aren't as good as you'd hope. And
a Charlie Sheen cameo proves to be a bad idea both on the page and on film.
The plates keep spinning,
not fascinating but certainly engaging, until the movie reaches the answer
to the question of whether Gekko's intentions toward Jake and Winnie are
sincere. Once that is resolved, you can just feel Loeb and Schiff
unable to answer the question of what their movie is actually about and
starting to fire off random climaxes, one after another, to all its many
threads. I'm sure it doesn't go on quite this long, but it certainly
feels like an additional half hour of false starts and unnecessary endings
follow the movie's logical final scene, and the ultimate resolution of
the Gekko/Jake/Winnie relationship in the movie's final scene feels so
utterly unearned as if to suggest all three were just informed that the
production had run out of film. An additional tag over the end credits
only makes matters worse. The movie pays lip service to crowd-pleasing
notions of family and “time” being more important than money, but none
of the characters decisions ultimately seem to be motivated by anything
more than greed or plot contrivance. And so many sins ultimately
go unpunished because the script pulls ways for everyone to win out of
its hat. “We like to be lied to. We like bedtime stories,”
Jake tells Winnie at one point. Right before the movie starts lying
to us and telling us bedtime stories.
Wall Street: Money
Never Sleeps isn't awful, but it also isn't very good and proves to
be an utterly unnecessary extension of an iconic 80's hit. Yeah,
it's great to see Douglas, particularly during his current health crisis,
revisit his most famous character so successfully. But in the end,
the movie really just feels like one of those “Hey, we can always do a
sequel to X” movies stars and filmmakers turn to when their careers aren't
going well. In this case, greed doesn't turn out to be very good
at all. |
