From Canadian Business magazine, April 26, 2010







Films

The ghost of Gordon Gekko

Why Oliver Stone's 1987 jeremiad ruined Wall Street films forever.
By Steve Maich

Hollywood has never had much use for bankers. Audiences are positively drowning in movie doctors, lawyers, spies and journalists, but movie financiers are as rare as gay action heroes. And if you’ve been looking forward to the release of Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, hoping that it might be the film that finally captures the essence of modern western capitalism, I have a couple of pieces of bad news.

The first, you’ve probably already heard — 20th Century Fox has decided to delay the movie’s release by almost six months. Instead of coming out this month as planned, Oliver Stone’s sequel to his 1987 jeremiad against greed in the capital markets won’t hit screens until late September.

The second bit of bad news is related to the first, but far more important: Wall Street, the sequel, is going to be horrible. Maybe even as bad as the original, and that’s saying something.

Take this warning for what it’s worth — the movie isn’t even finished yet, and I haven’t seen a single frame except for the 90-second trailer that’s been floating around the web for months — but rarely has a movie carried so many hallmarks of impending cinematic suckitude.

First, and most obviously, the delay itself should be a huge red flag. Fox managed to score some monumental marketing coups for the film this month, including cover stories in both Vanity Fair and GQ. Publicity like that is priceless, and yet the studio decided to walk away from it and let the buzz cool for six months. Why? Well, the studio tells us it’s because the movie is simply too good to release right away. At the very last second, the suits decided that they’d be better to hold out for a possible spot in the Cannes Film Festival and an early fall release. Never mind the fact that September is traditionally a month in which studios release all their dogs.

But, just for a moment, let’s take the studio at its word. Let’s accept that they believe they have a classic on their hands, and that’s why they’re keeping it under wraps. Even if they believe it, you have to view their confidence with extreme skepticism because there is no precedent to justify it. When Oliver Stone’s Wall Street landed in 1987, less than two months after the Black Monday stock market crash, it was the perfect moment to capture the world’s anger and fear over greed run amok in the stock market. The kindergarten-level morality lessons, the agonizingly stilted performances, the unintentionally hilarious dialogue — none of that mattered. The public was more than eager for simple answers amid gut-wrenching financial turmoil. It wasn’t so much a well-made movie as a well-timed one, and that has given it far more currency than it deserves.

It’s a shame, because big business seems like a natural place to find all the stuff that makes for good drama — fascinating characters, moral dilemmas, fear, hate, love, loyalty and betrayal — and the stakes could scarcely be higher, as the past two years have amply demonstrated. But to do it right, those kinds of stories call for nuance, subtlety and a deep understanding of the subject matter. Instead, we got Oliver Stone. We got Gordon Gekko. We got Wall Street, and now we’re going to get it again.

If you were a right-wing conspiracy theorist, you might conclude that Hollywood’s hostility toward high finance and the markets is rooted in politics — California liberal movie moguls sticking it to the conservative money men out east. But that doesn’t make sense. New York is a liberal city, and investment bank CEOs have a lot in common with movie studio CEOs. No, it seems more likely that Hollywood gets Wall Street wrong over and over again simply because Stone got there first. He made an indelible impression, and nobody ever thought of anything different they wanted to say.

This may seem impossible until you consider the profound cultural influence of landmark movies. When people think about boxing, they think of Rocky. When they think of the Mafia, The Godfather instantly comes to mind. And Wall Street established itself as a cultural touchstone in part because its characterization of the business world flattered the self-image of those it sought to criticize. Sure, Gordon Gekko was a slimeball, but he was also a badass in an expensive suit. To the math geeks, salesmen and commerce grads who are drawn to the securities business for the money, Gekko’s raw power and cunning appealed to an idealized notion of their own place in the world. If a job can’t be inspiring or high-minded, at least it can be cool. And so, people have spent the past two decades coming up to Michael Douglas and telling the bemused actor that he is the reason they went into finance. This isn’t just weird, it’s a sign of how Wall Street became a kind of self-propagating myth, repeated endlessly on TV, in books and, of course, movies.

Four years after Wall Street, the book American Psycho was released about another cruel and narcissistic Wall Street banker, obsessed with status and image, who descends into madness and grisly serial murder. In 2000, the film version came out. And that same year saw the release of Boiler Room, starring Ben Affleck and Vin Diesel, which featured a scene in which the young traders sit around watching Wall Street and quoting its dialogue verbatim. This is no accident. The two films share a nearly identical plot: ambitious naif is sucked into the vicious world of stock sales, struggles, then thrives, and finally rejects the soulless greed of the game.

Boiler Room could be easily dismissed as a bad movie with a copycat script and a lightweight cast. But it is also a symptom of Hollywood’s deeper problem with portraying capitalism in the wake of Wall Street. In Stone’s view of high finance, money is the central corrupting force in the world, lying is as natural as breathing, and ethics are for losers. He took the work of Tom Wolfe, drained it of its humour and its joy, and left us with a bleak pop culture image of Wall Street that has persisted for two decades.

Now I can hear you out there protesting. After all, Douglas won the Oscar for best actor for playing Gekko. But if that is seriously going to be your argument in favour of Wall Street’s artistic merit, then I must direct your attention to a film you might remember called Dances with Wolves. I do not bring it up merely because it won seven Oscars, including best director for Kevin Costner. I bring it up because Dances with Wolves suffers some of the very same artistic failings and critical virtues as Wall Street did. Both present an outsider’s naive and sanctimonious perspective on a foreign culture, and both give the impression of dealing with serious and challenging themes, without ever actually disturbing anybody’s preconceived notions of right, wrong, good and bad. The Academy absolutely eats that stuff up. To wit: Slumdog Millionaire, Crash, Munich, Erin Brockovich, JFK … the list goes on and on.

You have to give Stone credit for one thing, though. With Wall Street, he managed to pull off a difficult rhetorical trick. It would have been easy for the movie to be a self-righteous bore. Let’s face it, the pursuit of wealth is not exactly an alien concept in our society. Given the choice, most of us would rather be rich than poor, and filthy stinking rich is even better. So how do you present the pursuit of wealth as morally corrupt without alienating your audience? Well,Stone’s answer was to create a neat little distinction between the noble middle-class pursuit of a “decent life” on one hand (this is represented by Martin Sheen playing Bud Fox’s dad, Carl) and contrast it with the vile and soulless desire for mega-wealth as typified by the guys in the $5,000 suits. Good guys work hard and dream of one day buying a nicer car. Bad guys steal from the good guys and then run off to the Caribbean to snort blow on a yacht with some floozy.

This device makes Stone’s medicine slide down more easily, but it also reduces the film to a facile and profoundly clichéd morality fable. When Carl tells his son that he “never measured a man’s success by the size of his wallet,” we are helpfully led by the hand to the central theme. Which is nice because nobody likes it when they have to try to figure out what a movie’s about. When Bud walks out on the balcony of his new penthouse apartment, away from his super-model girlfriend, gazes out at the Manhattan skyline and asks aloud, “Who am I?,” one hardly knows whether to laugh or gag.

An insult to your intelligence? Sure, but this device does have the virtue of simplicity, and in Hollywood, simple sells. Things have to be good or bad. And if they start out a little of both, they need to land definitively on one side or the other by the third act. The problem is, capitalism is deeply complicated. And the more you know about corporate culture, the more you realize that it resists such pat characterizations. Very little is ever purely good, or purely evil. Crimes are committed in small increments, modest ethical compromises, and arcane abuses born more of expediency than overt malice. The financial crisis wasn’t triggered by an organized conspiracy of craven lunatics. It was born of a million small decisions, half-baked rationalizations and an epidemic of unfounded optimism. There was plenty of wrongdoing, some of it outrageous, but it was mostly the banal variety. Just don’t tell that to Oliver Stone. He thinks he’s chronicling a class revolution here. As he told Vanity Fair, explaining why he wanted to revisit the subject now: “It’s the collapse of capitalism and the collapse of our society. It is. Our way of life is going to change.”

Lines like that just scream how much Stone doesn’t understand about his subject, and why his films seem to have been hacked out with a machete rather than crafted with a scalpel. That’s how, in Wall Street 2, he can have Gordon Gekko (freshly sprung from a 23-year prison sentence for insider trading) say, “Twenty years ago I said greed is good. … Now it seems it’s legal.” It’d be clever if it weren’t so stupid. Greed has always been legal. Same goes for all the deadly sins — wrath, sloth, pride, lust, envy and gluttony. They’re all legal, and all thriving both on and off Wall Street.

This is what happens when a filmmaker takes a complicated subject he doesn’t understand and tries to simplify it. Actors spout slogans instead of dialogue, and characters become caricatures. Gordon Gekko isn’t a person, he’s Monty Burns in pleated pants and a slick-back. In fact, history suggests Wall Street would have been much better if it had been played for laughs. Business movies always work better as comedies because a strict understanding of the nuances isn’t necessary. Take Trading Places, for example. It was a low-budget 1983 star vehicle for Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd, best known for their starring roles on Saturday Night Live, but it parodies the arrogance and decadence of the ultra-rich without making wealth their crime. The good guys outsmart the bad guys and get rich in the end.

Or look at Jack Donaghy, Alec Baldwin’s send-up of a second-tier, social-climbing corporate executive in 30 Rock. It is so much sharper than Gekko could ever be, because Baldwin isn’t relying on accuracy and gravitas to give his portrayal weight. The slight distortion of reality is what makes it fun and what makes it effective satire. Watching Baldwin spout MBA-school aphorisms, and canned corporate wisdom to Liz Lemon deflates the self-importance of corporate poseurs rather than making them out to be psychotics.

But that kind of comedy requires a light touch, and Stone takes his work far too seriously to be satisfied with poking fun. And so, next September we can expect a wicked case of déja vu, as Stone reinforces a lot of the hoary clichés that he helped create. The cellphones will be smaller, the suits slimmer, but the message is the same: bankers are scum, ethics are history, money corrupts, and capitalism is a rigged game.

In a perfect world, popular cinema would be a place to get people thinking about what should change and what can’t. For those of us who think there are real and important issues related to the financial crisis and the way our system works, Wall Street 2 will feel like a missed opportunity. Instead, Money Never Sleeps will assure millions that their cynicism is absolutely justified. It won’t change a thing, because cynicism alone never does. Wall Streeters will be the movie’s biggest fans, and Stone will be left wondering what it takes to embarrass these guys.




http://www.canadianbusiness.com/after_hours/lifestyle_activities/article.jsp?content=20100426_10020_10020&page=2
_________________________________