Wall Street

(1987)

Dir: Oliver Stone

When I’m reading a newspaper, I tend to skip through the economics section. Yes, yes, yes, I know it’s important and all in our current enslavement to the capitalist machine, but good god is it boring and complicated.

Unfortunately for Oliver Stone’s 1987 assault on the consumer excess, it feels like two hours worth of this nonsense. Thank God it has the devilish Michael Douglas doing the talking, otherwise this would be unbearable. It’s a problem that arises in a lot of film basing themselves in reality; just how do you make your subject matter engaging to an audience who aren’t, let’s say, economics graduates? David Fincher recently faced a similar dilemma with The Social Network, an account of the inception of Facebook. Sounds Cancerously fun, but Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin somehow manage to make the extremely talky and technical script hip, breezy, riveting and engaging.

This is something which Stone never quite manages to do in Wall Street. He comes damn close, don’t get me wrong. His choice of cast is excellent, with the fresh-faced Charlie Sheen, intoxicating Darryl Hannah, Martin Sheen is, well, Martin Sheen, and, of course, the slimy Douglas adding a great deal of sizzle to mind-rottingly dull dialogue. The soundtrack, as in Fincher’s tale, is superb; Talking Heads bop away in true 80s style, almost turning the narcoleptic script into lyrics. But it isn’t quite there.

The story feels a little too predictable at times. Charlie Sheen’s young, ambitious, impressionable stockbroker is lured away from the hard-working ethics of his father by the glitz and glamour of Douglas’ Gordon Gekko, including an army of prostitutes, including the ‘classy’ Darryl Hannah.

But this is obvious, Faustian stuff. The moral climax is clear from the outset, and while I’m a fan of both Stone and any degradation of capitalism, an injection of objective subtlety would have helped Wall Street’s impact.

*** / *****

“Greed could be better.”