Thursday, Sep. 23, 2010 - Quotes of the Day
Thursday, Sep. 23, 2010
On Monday, at President Obama's CNBC town-hall meeting, one of his sharpest critics was a Harvard Law School classmate and current hedge-fund boss, Anthony Scaramucci. "I represent the Wall Street community," he said, as if he'd been elected in a vote of downtown billionaires. "We have felt like a piñata. Maybe you don't feel like you're whackin' us with a stick, but we certainly feel like we've been whacked with a stick. When are we [meaning the U.S. government] gonna stop whackin' the Wall Street piñata?"
Aside from the entertainment value of an overeducated, way-too-rich money manager talking like Christopher Moltisanti on The Sopranos, Scaramucci's plaint had an unintended poignancy often found among the morally myopic. What the federal government did, Mr. Scaramucci, was give you and your pals a billion-dollar bailout after you gamed the world financial system close to bankruptcy. Then "the Wall Street community" went on doing business the same rapacious way, making risky bets and refusing loans to people who needed them. You were the guys with the stick; it's America's investors and homeowners who got whacked. (See 25 people to blame for the financial crisis.)
Say this for Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Oliver Stone's sequel to his 1987 fable of institutionalized greed: none of the sharks in this pool whine over a little spilled blood. They bend the rules, knead the dough and shiv one another with the competitive grin or grimace of filthy-rich 25-year-olds at a lunchtime racquetball session. Scoring on Wall Street, and in both Wall Street movies, is, as the films' predator-in-chief Gordon Gekko says, "not about the money. It's about the game." Think of the financial-services industry as the NFL a hard-contact sport except that it's the folks in the stands, not the players, who can get their heads knocked off. (See the top 10 worst movie-sequel titles.)
At the beginning of Money Never Sleeps, Gekko (Michael Douglas again) leaves prison, where he'd been sent for mischief committed in the original film, just in time to see his spiritual offspring manipulate world currency with a toxic grandeur Gekko only dreamed of. And again he has a slightly more principled young striver Shia LaBeouf, the next-generation Charlie Sheen primed for a master's instruction and destruction. Moving as fast and recklessly as a trillion-dollar fat-finger stock-market transaction, the film has the drive, luxe and sarcastic wit of the snazziest Hollywood movies for most of its two-hours-plus running time. Only at the end does it go soft and sweet, like the candy inside a piñata. (See how Americans are spending now.)
Set mostly in 2008, just before the autumn stock-market crash and its revelation of industry-wide felonies, Money Never Sleeps is also a parable of sons trying to learn from the triumphs and sins of their fathers. That makes it personal to the three gents at the core of both movies: to Stone, who dedicated the original film to his stockbroker father Lou; to producer Edward Pressman, whose stepfather was a Manhattan banker; and to Douglas, whose career can be seen as a struggle to balance the legacy of his movie-icon dad, the majestically feral Kirk, with his own more modulated top-dog persona. (See the top 10 crooked CEOs.)
Stone's original exposé of the financial world lucked into a historical moment: it opened two months after the Black Monday stock-market crash. But it might have quickly faded from notoriety to anonymity if the director and writer Stanley Weiser hadn't invented that black knight of finance, Gordon Gekko and if Douglas, borrowing some of the pile-driving charm from his dad's early gangster roles, hadn't invested the character with such reptilian brio, such pleasure in playing the game and gaming the system. Strutting his boardroom machismo, he expectorated such lasting aphorisms as "Lunch is for wimps," "What's worth doing is worth doing for money," "If you need a friend, get a dog" and "Greed ... is good, greed is right, greed works." Gekko was a monster out of Jacobean satire, yet he connived with so much gusto that the creature became a role model for financial go-getting. If the investment sector needed a patron saint of killer rapacity as it clawed its way to record profits and stranglehold power in the middle years of the past decade, Gekko was it.
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Sins of the Fathers
The new movie written by Allan Loeb (chronicler of another white-collar scam in the Harvard-boys-take-Vegas hit 21) and Stephen Schiff (whose script for the 1997 remake of Lolita also deals with a father figure's corruption of the young) opens in 2001, when Gekko is released from an eight-year prison stretch. At first we see him only as a torso with a heavier gut, being handed his effects from 1993, including a mobile phone the size of LeBron James' sneaker. Like any smart criminal, Gekko writes a best-selling autobiography, less mea culpa than me-a-genius, and revels in his fame as grizzled sage and insult comic. "Money's a bitch that never sleeps, and she's jealous," he tells a rapt crowd of MBA students who are in danger of becoming "the NINJA Generation: No Income, No Job, no Assets."
While in stir, Gordon may have developed a conscience. "It's easy selling crack to kids in the schoolyard," he says of the CDOs and all the other arcane acronyms the Street sold to investors whose avarice was matched only by their gullibility. In his little black heart, he may simply regret not having had the imagination and cojones to work those shell-game maneuvers back when he was on top. But he hasn't lost the gift, and by early 2008 he's re-established himself enough to look for his estranged daughter Winnie (Carey Mulligan) and to forage for a new dauphin, whom he finds in LaBeouf's Jake Moore. (See the top 10 bankruptcies.)
In the 1987 version, baby bull Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen, who makes a cameo appearance here) had to determine his career compass by following either his blue-collar dad (his real father, Martin Sheen) or Gekko. This time, three moguls want to be Jake's mentor, boss, father figure. The first is the man Jake works for: the aging financial boss Lewis Zabel (Frank Langella), instantly pegged as an old-school mensch by his bow-tie-and-suspenders couture, his grumbling that investment banking is "just a bunch of machines now, tellin' us what to do" and his my-word-is-my-bleepin'-bond ethics.
When Zabel's firm is hobbled by debt and his colleagues in the Wall Street star chamber shut it down à la Lehman Brothers, he steps in front of an onrushing subway train. That geste impresses Gekko: "No one else in this market's had the balls to commit suicide. It's an honorable thing to do." In the wake of the 1929 crash, desperate stockbrokers leaped to their deaths out of skyscraper windows, without a government safety net to break their fall. This time nobody took the fast way to the ground floor; instead, they concocted a government bailout also shown in the movie, with a Henry Paulson lookalike agreeing to the $700 billion tab and reaped billions more. (See pictures of the stock-market crash of 1929.)
The second father figure is Gekko, now the wrinkled prophet of Wall Street ("It's the greatest transfer of money from Main Street to Wall Street, and it's going to happen again") who's nostalgic for the Reagan era ("Just like the old days, when we slaughtered men for payback") yet eager to show he can still play with the young barracudas ("Right now it's ugly times ugly, and that's when the ugly get going"). Gekko may soon become Jake's father-in-law, thanks to the lad's betrothal to Winnie, an idealistic sort who runs a green-leaning website. She hates Gordon for being in jail while her drug-addled brother killed himself which is kind of like Penelope blaming Odysseus for everything that happened in Ithaca during the Trojan War. Yet Winnie's impending merger with Jake suggests she's the latest proof of the maxim: You marry your father.
The third mentor in waiting is Bretton James (Josh Brolin, yet another son of showbiz royalty), who hires Jake when Zabel's demise puts him out of a job. Chief stud at the Goldman Sachslike firm Churchill Schwartz, Bretton has the polish and cold smile of a lizard with a manicure. If Brolin's take on Bush 43 in Stone's W. biopic was muddied, he's near perfect here as the embodiment of all the guys who learned how to manipulate the world's money at the School of Gekko. Bretton's prize possession: a framed Goya sketch of, naturally, "Saturn Devouring One of His Children." Only Bretton isn't Saturn; he's Satan.
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Bubbles and Baubles
Stone made his writer-director rep with amped-up screeds on Important Subjects: assassinations (JFK), wars in South America (Salvador) and Southeast Asia (Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, Heaven and Earth) and the media's fascination with serial murderers (Natural Born Killers) and right-wing demagoguery (Talk Radio). In the past decade, with Alexander, World Trade Center and W., he calmed down, and his films slumped into a long lull.
Money Never Sleeps slaps his oeuvre back to life. Rodrigo Prieto's cinematography and Kristi Zea's production design give the movie visual allure in spades. The ribbon of Dow tickers crawls across the actors' faces as if Wall Street were the Matrix. When Stone is not flashing Lou Zabel's ghost on a men's-room wall to haunt Jake's conscience like Christmas Past, he's packing the film with objective correlatives: Zabel speaks of stock bubbles, and we see a kid's soap bubbles rising blithely, precariously over Central Park. (More bubbles can be seen in the movie's recently added epilogue.) (See 10 perfect jobs for the recession [EM] and after.)
Costing about $70 million but looking as if it had been made on a budget only Lloyd Blankfein could pony up, the picture scampers across Manhattan to drop into the Metropolitan Museum, the World Financial Center atrium and Shun Lee Dynasty and to sport guest spots by Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, über-publicist Peggy Siegal, Scarmucci's fellow CNBC shaman Jim Kramer and Stone himself. Wretched excess rarely had such a swank face: a Metropolitan Museum charity dinner where all the swindlers gather, and every concubine is accessorized with gaudy earrings; Jake's engagement gift to Winnie of a Bulgari diamond Liz Taylor would envy; rich men's toys like motorbikes and crash helmets equipped with Bluetooth cell phones. (The ringtone on Jake's phone is Ennio Morricone's coyote-wail theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.)
LaBeouf, who always seemed too seedy and smart to play action heroes in Indiana Jones and Transformers movies, is terrific here as a man who wants to make it big without breaking too many commandments. Most other members of the large cast invest themselves fully in the energy and piranha-like appetites of their roles. Only Mulligan, so charming as the precocious teen in An Education, is distressingly wan and weak as the token saint; she's much better in the current Never Let Me Go, to which she brings gravitas, not just waterworks.
Douglas, looking more Kirkian than ever, struts through most of the movie having almost too much fun; if he was worried that Gekko would be too appealing, it doesn't show in his born salesman's smile. But then he has a big scene, in which Gordon confesses to Winnie his despair over the suicide of her drug-addled brother. As he sobbingly takes responsibility for "how many mistakes I made as a father," Douglas boldly merges his character with his personal life. When the actor's son Cameron was recently sentenced to five years in prison for drug-dealing, Douglas owned up to "being a bad father" and added that without going to jail, Cameron "was going to be dead or somebody was going to kill him." (See pictures of TIME's Wall Street covers.)
As social commentary, the script is best when it's bitter. The first two acts are a splendid vaudeville of fast talking and dirty dealing. At the climax, though, the picture becomes Wall Street Weak. It starts flailing toward an Old Hollywood happy ending of revenge and redemption, forcing Gekko to commit a lapse repellent to his nature a good deed in his stab at reconstituting his family. A bleaker worldview, truer to the Street's carnivore ethics, would have demanded the abortion of one character's fetus as a final sting and judgment. Instead, the conclusion leaves the main players in place for a Wall Street 3, which Stone has said he's contemplating. So at the end, he assembles most of the cast for a gala birthday party, as if America's Gekkos deserved cake, not prison time, for their deeds. Unless Stone, Loeb and Schiff believe that the stock market really is just a game, with no calamitous consequences, they have seriously breached the satirist's code. Satire is supposed to leave bite marks, not lipstick traces.
Unlike the first movie, made before the 1987 crash, this Wall Street decries financial chicanery from the ethical altitude afforded by hindsight. Set in 2008, it allows Gekko to speak prescient lines written in 2009 for audiences in 2010. (The film does have one serendipitous subplot the peddling of offshore-oil-drilling leases suggesting an awareness of the BP scandal. In fact, the movie was finished early this year and had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May.) No deep thoughts here; this is a product of shiny surfaces and glittering patter, the cinematic equivalent of a derivatives offering. Instead of whacking Wall Street, Stone gives it a poke that ends up a tickle. The movie's cunning strategy that financiers can bring down their own villains from the inside should please the mass movie audience. And Anthony Scaramucci too.
See pictures of the global financial crisis.
- Richard Corliss
- Gordon Gekko returns in Oliver Stone's 'Wall Street' sequel, but this time the satire doesn't sting so much as tickle
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