He's Back, Baby


Some 23 years after Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) made “Greed Is Good,� an only slightly tongue-in-cheek credo of an era, and his slicked-back mane and tailored suits defined the 1980s look (at least for a subclass of New York City’s stock market sharks), Gekko comes roaring back in Oliver Stone’s latest mishmosh of fact and fiction.

   Now it’s the 2000s, and we’ve been through two market crashes, subprime loans and the home equity bubble, TARP, too-big-to-fail, Bernie Madoff and the re-inflation of the bubble — the biggest bubble of all being Stone’s ego, we might add.  

   They’re all there in the film (except Madoff), nearly as tangible as the cast of thousands that inhabits the story.

   So we get the head of a giant investment bank, Louis Zabel (Frank Langella), throwing himself in front of a subway train when his firm is allowed to fail. Grim meetings of shadowy Federal Reserve bankers (including Jules, played with verve by the 95-year-old Eli Wallach) follow, while, mostly, everyone tries to game the system by short selling and engaging in insider dealing.  And that’s just for starters.

   As Gekko says, it makes his crimes of the 1980s, which landed him in the clinker, look quaint. The movie starts with his release from prison and takes us through his rehabilitation — first as author (“Is Greed Good?â€�) and lecturer, then in business partnership with Jake (Shia LaBeouf), who is engaged to Gekko’s daughter, Winnie (Carey Mulligan), and, finally as revenge seeker, looking to punish Breton James (Josh Brolin), an investor whom Jake blames for bringing down Zabel’s firm. This lad, by the way, has an evangelical belief in the economic profitability of a cockamamie form of “laser fusionâ€� energy.  Or something.

   Does it all add up? No. But this is the Oliver Stone of “JFKâ€� we’re seeing.  Half of this “Wall Streetâ€� redux consists of long-winded speeches aimed at the moral turpitude of the American financial system. (Recall that Stone’s immediately preceding film consisted of interviews with South America’s Socialist leaders.)

   The other half is a grand spectacle of scenery-chewing actors, scenery-chewing scenery, even scenery-chewing Stone. He shows up in a handful of cameos, one of which has him posing in front of a bizarre float of a love-making couple.

   Whatever.

   Not that all this chewing isn’t frequently delicious.  Douglas inhabits Gekko with great relish; Langella is typically and wonderfully gruff; Mulligan, with her enormous eyes and expressive face, manages effortlessly to create the movie’s most sympathetic character; Brolin rages; and even Susan Sarandon as Jake’s mother, a Long Island real estate broker, is a delight, broad accent and all.  

   Chomp!

   Only LaBeouf is miscast, and he nearly grinds things to a halt.  There’s not much he can credibly pull off.  He’s not quite Keanu Reeves-class wooden, but his only acting move is to fix his puppy-dog eyes into a stare.

   Yikes.

   However similar to real financial skullduggery, a cinematic world in which everyone is out to game everyone else — and the director is very likely playing us, as well — ends up an exercise in cinematic onanism.  But we can revel in Gordon Gekko’s inevitable triumph.  It’s a heck of a ride.

“Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps� is rated PG-13 for language and thematic elements. It is playing at the Moviehouse in Millerton, NY, and the Cinerom in Torrington, CT.

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