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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?”

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