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All movies seen on 10/26/2007

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Wall Street (1987)

Directed by Oliver Stone

Overview

A young and impatient stockbroker is willing to do anything to get to the top, including trading on illegal inside information taken through a ruthless and greedy corporate raider whom takes the youth under his wing.

Rated R | Length 126 minutes

Actors

Viewing History (seen 1 time)


Date Viewed	Device	Format	Source	Rating
10/26/2007	TV	DVD	Owned	4 stars
				(Average) 4 stars

Viewing Notes

This originally appeared as a DVD review for PopSyndicate.com.

Gordon Gecko was right, greed is good.

The decade of decadence was rolling twenty years ago and people were making a lot of money, but they were spending even more. Profits were rising, but at whose expense? That’s the tale Oliver Stone wanted to tell.

It’s 1985 and Bud Fox is a grunt-level Wall Street broker with blue collar roots, toiling every day to cold sell stocks to his firm’s investors. But he has a dream to land the whale: Gordon Gecko, a Donald Trumpian investor who makes money at any cost. On Gecko’s birthday, Fox manages to grab five minutes of his time by landing a box of Cuban cigars and delivering it to his office. That five minutes changes Fox’s life, as he opts to give Gecko a piece of inside information about a judgement against Bluestar airlines that nets Gecko a nice profit. Gecko then takes Bud under his wing and raises him up to be an inside-trading shark. Fox gets the high-life life he always wanted, but quickly finds out that they’re taking over companies and their profits at the expense of everyone underneath. When his world is about to chew up and spit out his mechanic father, he decides to rebel against Gecko and his world falls apart.

Like many movies, Wall Street is a morality tale, but director Oliver Stone’s point of view isn’t what you would expect out of the stereotypically liberal Hollywood. If you look deeper, Stone isn’t saying, ““Greed is bad,”” he’s saying ““Greed is good, to a point.”” Ironically, Gordon Gecko inspired a generation of investors and business sharks, the Jaws of which may have been the Enron scandal in 2003. The film is like every other Stone film, in that it’s long and preachy, but it also rings true and you realize that what Stone paints on the screen is probably closer to reality than we all want to believe.

Aside from the typically terrible Darryl Hannah and her awful dubbing, the cast in Wall Street is retrospectively amazing, from Charlie Sheen and Michael Douglas leading the way to Martin Sheen, James Spader, Hal Holbrook and John C. McGinley. Granted, Charlie Sheen is no Martin Sheen, but this may be his best performance to date. Michael Douglas is absolutely choice as Gecko, as he revels in his snake skin. Martin Sheen is Martin Sheen as he is in everything else he does. I don’t quite buy him as a middle-class mechanic, but he does what he always does well.

There are few special features on this special edition, but what’s there is rich. I’m surprised, but Stone turned out to do a commentary for the film and it’s one of the best I’ve heard, even though I despise one-man commentaries in general. Stone tells nine kinds of stories about the making of the film, from meeting Frank Sinatra to his motivations for making the film; I still think the film’s principals should have been on board. The second disc includes a lengthy documentary about not only the making of the film, but about the real Wall Street world and the investment world at that time. There’s a making-of doco that extends the first documentary, but talks more about casting and how the 1987 stock market cash affected Stone’s direction and the film’s reception; it’s fascinating to see how Stone crawled inside Michael Douglas’ head. Finally there’s a round of deleted scenes with Stone’s standard issue commentary and you see the film could have been much longer than it was.

There is class warfare in America still and you’ll see it rear its ugly head the closer we get to every major election. A movie like Wall Street and a character like Gordon Gecko are always used as the avatars of the ““evil Republicans”” (who are in and of themselves avatars of industry) when in reality, whether we like it or not, it’s people like Gecko that make the world turn. It’s the real Geckos across all sectors that helped us become the pre-eminent economy of the Eighties. He may have been ruthless and unethical, but maybe, just maybe Gordon Gecko wasn’t that bad. With balance, greed is natural and greed is necessary; greed is good.

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