Review - Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

Oliver Stone’s 1987 film Wall Street defined an era.  Its sequel will not. Of all the explanations for the credit crunch, none have anything to do an old financier trying to reconnect with his daughter, or a young banker trying to avenge the death of his mentor. Those are the tropes of fiction, not of finance, not even of real life.

In the first movie, Stone found a plot that reflected the reality of the financial sector. Back then, the archetypal Wall Street deal was the leveraged buyout, in which bankers borrow enough money to buy a firm and then use that firm’s own cash flow to pay off the debt. Bankers made big bucks but workers got fired. Money created money but factories closed.

And so, in that film, Charlie Sheen plays an ambitious young banker from a blue-collar background. Michael Douglas woos him with the promise of enormous wealth if he betrays the firm his father works for.  In both film and real world, industrial America was eviscerated in order to enthrone finance.

In the new film, Stone’s characters do mention leverage, short selling of securitised debt, the flipping of houses for a quick profit but these comments seem tacked on to a plot that has more to do with the conventions of middlebrow filmmaking than to the biggest financial disaster of our time. Gordon Gekko gets out of jail but his daughter spurns him because she blames him for her brother’s death.  Her banker boyfriend’s father figure kills himself and he wants revenge.  What does that have to do with a run on the shadow banking system?

Maybe finance has grown too complicated, too rococo, too self referential, too divorced from the real world in the intervening years.  But my sense is that Oliver Stone chickened out.  He decided the actual machinations that led to the credit crunch were tedious and the average moviegoer would tune out.

In Sebastian Faulk’s underrated A Week in December, a banker plots the deal of a lifetime, one that will make his fortune but send the world economy into crisis.  He is a cold man. All he cares about is money, and action.  His family is falling apart and he barely notices.  In Adam Haslett’s Union Atlantic, a financier living alone in a big house ruins his firm, trying to ride out a series of bad trades, hiding them from regulators and his bosses. You learn something about finance and the men who work in it by reading these books.

Even though Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is based on the real life collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, it is more a male weepy than an exploration of a vital and dangerous world. It is set in Wall Street, but it is not about Wall Street.  Too bad.  I guess we need to keep waiting for the Platoon of the financial crisis.

That said, the film looks good.  Rodrigo Prieto’s cinematography shows wealthy Manhattan in all its shiny glamour. Eli Wallach is magnificent as the eminence gris of an investment firm, a shark in old man’s clothing. Handsome Josh Brolin conveys suitable menace.  Carey Mulligan, luminous in An Education, is bland and boring here.  Shia LaBeouf, as always, makes you wonder why he is a movie star.  Michael Douglas looks like he had fun making the film but also looks like he didn’t break a sweat. The film opens in London on October 6.

Watch the trailer for "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps" here