Chapter Two:
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
By Brett Ballard-Beach
June 23, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
To start this week’s column, here are two personal revelations, one slightly less significant than the other.
First revelation: I worked in the mortgage industry for six years from October 2002 to September 2008. I say that now with more than a bit of a pained expression on my face. I was “only” involved in data entry and file setup and was not an underwriter or decision maker on any loans being granted and the three companies I was employed by over that span of time were wholesale, meaning we did not work directly with the borrowers, but had the real estate brokers as our client base. At the risk of sounding ingenuous, the people I was lucky to work alongside were ethical, good at their jobs, and responsible.
But as a microcosm of the housing bubble that was carrying along the US economy during that time, my experience has some relation to the bigger picture and to my feelings about this week’s film. I made a ridiculous amount of money for the job I did from the time I was hired as a temp until about a year before I left the industry (when I was making only a slightly ridiculous amount). During my first nine months on the job, I got two holiday bonuses - both while still a temp; flown in to Sacramento for the annual company party, as were all 1,000-odd employees from across the US; and regularly made more overtime in a two week period than my base wage was worth. I bought a house I had no right buying simply because rates were unbelievable, closing and other costs were taken care of, and my wife and I only had to come in with $100. I paid on that house 11 and three-quarters months longer than I lived there, as part of the alimony deal I struck with her after we divorced.
I stayed in the industry so long, at least early on, in order to afford a housing payment, rent, a car payment, credit card bills, etc. but after first one company and then the next went bankrupt and the years kept adding up, I faced the truth that I was: 1) thankful my boss kept finding me (and a few others) a new place to hang our hats; 2) scared to jump off into the unknown - because I knew I had to get out of the business for the sake of my soul; and 3) unwilling to deal with the harsh truth that I would be making significantly less wherever I went. Eventually, I did take leave, heading back into the slightly less treacherous world of non-profits, which I had prior experience in. I may not have defaulted on my loan or been foreclosed on, or had to declare bankruptcy, but through my actions I threw myself into the insane cycle, taking advantage of a deal simply because it was too good to be true, rather than asking myself if it was the best thing or the right thing.
Second revelation: Being an unreconstructed English/cinema studies graduate, I tend to be a bit obsessive-compulsive about matters of grammatical accuracy in general, and particularly in relation to movie titles and quotes. Stray or additional articles of speech or mangled lines of classic dialogue send my spell-checking brain into overdrive. Every time Clint Eastwood’s 1992 Oscar-winning western has been referred to as The Unforgiven or David Fincher’s 2002 home-invasion thriller is tagged as The Panic Room, I bemoan the lack of good copy editors (and simultaneously wonder if it’s all part of some outreach program to find good homes for wayward words).
Although it’s not as much of a misquote as the persistent belief that Rick tells Sam to “play it again” in Casablanca, in Oliver Stone’s 1987 drama Wall Street, financier Gordon Gekko (played by Michael Douglas) does not exactly utter the three words that start this column, during a speech to the stockholders of a company of which he is now the single largest shareholder. The full sentence runs as follows: “The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good.” He does go on to state that “greed is right”, “greed clarifies” and “greed works” but obviously those aren’t the parts that have become as iconic a 1980s sound bite as President Reagan’s admonishment to Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall” uttered earlier that same year.
(An aside: Having made that comparison, I consider that there is an interesting parallel between the larger-than-life status both quotes have achieved, the former for the way it is now used in a VH1 I Love the ‘80s way to wink wink nudge nudge at precisely the sort of excess and lax morals that Wall Street - inspired by insider trading scandals in the mid-80s - railed against, and the latter for the way it has become part of the larger revisionist Reagan myth of our 40th president singlehandedly bringing an end to Communism in Eastern Europe - an argument well examined in Will Bunch’s recent book “Tear Down This Myth.”)
I have always been taken with that clause, “for lack of a better word.” Gekko, among his other qualities, is a smooth talker, able to sound polite, cultured, and jovial even while taking a metaphorical knife to an opponent, but he can also adjust himself as the occasion necessitates. Here, speaking before a large audience (as he also does during his first extended appearance in Money Never Sleeps) he becomes anecdotal and almost folksy, creating a vibe of us vs. them even though he is so squarely in the “them” that the irony becomes quite pungent.
But “greed is good” or more accurately “greed. . . is good” became the touchstone of a generation. And what is both interesting and frustrating about the return of Stone and Douglas to Gekko’s world 23 years later, a world in financial meltdown just like our own, is seeing how Gekko isn’t entirely the bad guy anymore. He has grown older, as have his creator and portrayer, and more than a little sentimental and the tension from the outside and within the storyline is the extent, if any, of Gekko’s rehabilitation. Is he a changed man? Does he value the bind of family ties more than the ability to make a quick billion?
A brief prologue (with an amusing sight gag) shows Gekko released from prison in October 2001, after serving nearly a decade for insider trading, unclaimed by anyone outside the gates, as much as a ghost to the world as the empty space where the world’s tallest buildings once stood across the river from his cell. The film then picks up in 2008 shortly before the U.S. economy began to hemorrhage.
In constructing the narrative that follows, Stone and co-writers Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff opt for a focus on relationships, primarily parent/child but also mentor/protégé, rather than a blistering indictment of the real-life financial circumstances. (For these, something like Charles Ferguson’s documentary Inside Job would be key viewing.) And perhaps those are false expectations to have for a big-budget ($70 million) star vehicle (Douglas and Shia LaBeouf) directed by the Oliver Stone of 2010. The tone here is more elegiac than confrontational - although it certainly hums at times with verbal sparring and sly digs at our culture enraptured with whatever apocalypse of the moment can sell fear to the public - and in that way it is a continuation of sorts from World Trade Center and, to a lesser degree, W.
The in-the-face-style, visual overload and historical record overhauling featured in films such as The Doors, JFK, and Nixon; and the savage satirical indictments on display in Natural Born Killers, U-Turn, and Any Given Sunday have given way to more measured tones in his last two films. World Trade Center made the political personal by reducing its 9/11 story strictly to the rescue of the two last survivors from the collapse of the Twin Towers. It was as honestly sentimental and old school Hollywood as anything he has ever done although I preferred the docudrama approach of United 93. W., far from being the hatchet job hysterical conservatives were expecting, was a low-key and quirky look at a life-long failure’s Quixotic rise to commander-in-chief and at least did as much to redeem him in my eyes, as Stone’s Nixon did for establishing him as a tragic figure on par with any in Shakespeare.
Bringing Gekko back to the here and now promises jolts that the movie ultimately never comes through with, but it delivers solid entertainment for at least three quarters of its running time, and once it becomes clear that Stone is in reflective mode and that the movie is going to play coy - not once but twice - about Gekko’s true intentions, rather than have him be in full unredeemed mode, there are small pleasures to be had and upon which to focus, particularly some sharp character turns by a gallery of stars and character actors, and a soundtrack that provides a weird parallel to the first film.
The chief conceit of the plot is that Gekko’s 20-something estranged daughter Winnie Gekko (Carey Mulligan), a content writer for a Huffington Post-like website, is living with and soon becomes engaged to one Jake Moore (LaBeouf). Moore is a young Wall Street trader (Daddy issues, what Daddy issues?) but one who has a good heart - he doesn’t fool around when opportunity in a short skirt knocks and then sits down at a nightclub; he supports the effort of a “green” research scientist - to balance out his drive for money and power. When the head of Moore’s firm/his father figure (Frank Langella in a small role, effectively cast against type) is professionally crushed by a rival’s power play, Moore seeks out father Gekko on the sly for advice and soon finds himself caught between several generations of professional, personal and familial conflicts.
Loeb and Schiff provide a nice balance to the expected father-daughter drama, with the brief portrait sketched of Moore’s relationship with his mother. Played (almost but not quite overplayed) by Susan Sarandon in two brief scenes, her character further encapsulates the movie’s confluence of a toxic economy with toxic parental values/guidance. Jacob is financially carrying his mother, a former nurse who decided to become a home flipper, and who now finds herself financially overextended and then some. Unlike the dueling father figures for Bud Fox’s soul in the first film, Gekko and Fox’s blue-collar father, there are only parental figures in absentia or default here. Fox himself actually shows up briefly, bumping into and chatting with Gekko at a charity auction, looking and sounding like nothing so much as a pleased-as-punch Charlie Sheen about two benders away from total collapse.
But if Stone never quite extends any criticism or approbation to the American public at large’s role in the financial crisis, aside from alluding to it in a scene where a studio audience guffaws in adoration and eats up Gekko’s stage patter and spiel as he hawks his memoirs (“Is Greed Good?”), he seems to direct his harshest feelings towards himself. It may just be my eyes but Josh Brolin’s physical presence as Bretton James, a Gekko 2.0 (and onetime business partner of the original) calls to mind nothing so much as Stone’s appearance nearly 25 years ago, around the time of the first film. Is this the director’s way of atoning, for calling himself out on the fact that his character, meant to show the dark side of unchecked capitalism, has become a beloved anti-hero a la Tony Montana? That Stone once again cameos in the film as an unnamed investor only muddies my thinking on this. Bretton is no more a one-sided “villain” than Gekko ever was and Brolin never slips into anything resembling caricature in capturing Bretton’s clench-jawed certitude that he deserves everything he has had coming and will always continue to do so.
I was quite surprised, pleasantly so, to find David Byrne, Brian Eno, and Talking Heads all on the soundtrack for Money Never Sleeps, as they were for Wall Street. The first film used a pair of songs from Byrne & Eno’s landmark 1981 album, the electronica forerunner “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts” and the sweetest TH song ever “This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody)”. Money Never Sleeps ups the ante with half a dozen songs from Byrne and Eno’s own musical chapter two, the 2008 collaboration “Everything that Happens Will Happen Today”, several more latter-day Byrne solo tunes, and a reprise of “Naïve Melody” over most of the closing credits.
The album was not written with any thought or knowledge of the movie, but the movie seems to have chosen those songs specifically for some scenes, almost as if Stone gave the album to his screenwriters and told them to find inspiration in the tunes. Like the movie, it's a lot mellower in comparison to its forebear (although still as lovably quirky as an album from the two musicians should be). Between Stone’s use of them, the Byrne tune that opens the Dennis Quaid corporate comedy In Good Company and psycho killer Patrick Bateman’s affection for them in the pages of American Psycho, I do feel the need to ask, “How did David Byrne become the soundtrack for disaffected Wall Street types and the spiritual malaise brought on by a greed-centric worldview?”
To return at the end here to the only slightly star-crossed lovers at the story’s center, I feel the need to comment briefly (spoilers next paragraph) on the romance and then single out a particular moment involving Mulligan. I enjoy LaBeouf and although I don’t find him particularly compelling, he is able to ramp up from quiet desperation to surface desperation in an affecting way, as he does often here, or say, at the climax of Eagle Eye. I am also not sure I ever bought into the relationship between Winnie and Jake the way I was meant to.
Although their break-up scene is affecting, their reconciliation at the climax (abetted by a presumably reformed father Gekko) doesn’t work, nor does a too sentimental for words closing credits sequence. But what I carry away from the climax is Mulligan’s visage. As she stands frozen on the steps leading up to her building, almost bullied by passive-aggressive kindness by the two men in her life, she maintains a composure that is somehow both moving and unsettling. For what must be at least 20 seconds, but feels like forever, the camera stays trained on her, and her features offer no definitive clue. There is a look of desperation, yes, but also, I would argue, of resolve, of anger, of steely determination, of a mind racing, of odds being placed, of the sort of cold calculation a businessman makes as the closing bell fast approaches. It’s a fleeting, unexpected and unforgettable moment that, were the movie to cut off there, would pull the ground out from under our feet, would make us mutter, “well, like father, like daughter.”
Next time: Combined stats on two first installments based on the same author’s books: 19 Oscar nominations, 7 wins, nearly $140 million grossed. The sequels: 0 nominations, 0 wins, $16 million grossed. 20 years and 15 years later, respectively. How do Texasville and The Evening Star, the cinematic chapter twos of author Larry McMurtry, stand up?