Film: Wall Street

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f83M2zR4smU&w=420&h=315]

 

It's hard to believe I'd never seen this film till this weekend, which was cold and miserable and demanding some sort of film night comfort when we'd put Anya to bed on Saturday. So many standout quotes have made it into the lexicon--"lunch is for wimps", "greed is good" etc--that it's attained the status of modern classic, no doubt helped by Oliver Stone's stratospheric levels of self-belief.

But it didn't quite make it for me. It might be just that the world has changed so much since then. The world of the 1980s Masters of the Universe seems almost antique, as when Gordon Gekko boasts that total personal wealth as high as $50 million is attainable in this freewheeling new world. Obviously inflation has changed things, but still: Goldman Sachs' Lloyd Blankfein made that much in 2007 alone.

There's also a few clangers--particularly in the denouement, which involves what seems to be a wholesale misunderstanding of shareholder behaviour (they agree to sell stock for $18 the day after it had been trading for $24).

But I think the main problem is that while the film strives for greatness, it only manages it in flashes--and the best lines do go to the antihero Gekko. That undercuts the moral thrust of the thing, which seems to be saying that Gekko is destroying the lives of American workers. As a result, the film basically fails to make the case it's trying to present--a correct one, as we can now clearly see--that the financialisation of the US economy since the early 1980s has harmed its performance and the lives of its working people.

Obviously that's a pretty high standard for a mainstream Hollywood drama. But it is pretty much the one Stone sets for himself, with the film's father-son dynamics and grand set-pieces. So while it's diverting, the film is a bit like one of those tequila sunrises or mai tais the characters are no doubt knocking back in their spare time: tasty, but a bit insubstantial.

One thing where I have to hand it to this film, though, is the stellar cast. Michael Douglas, Martin and Charlie Sheen, Daryl Hannah, Sean Young, Terence Stamp, James Spader--even that guy who plays Dr Cox in Scrubs as a bad-tempered trader. That's the sort of ensemble that only a Robert Altman could assemble these days.