Taken as a diptych, 1987’s Wall Street and the new Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps form a kind of documentary about New York City, computers, phones, suits, the music of David Byrne and Brian Eno—whose collaborations provide the soundtrack for both movies—and the enduring appeal of Michael Douglas, who returns as nefarious financial shark Gordon Gekko, a role for which he won an Oscar and which, to me at least, most strongly invokes the screen persona of Douglas’ legendary father. Unfortunately, watching Wall Street and its sequel back-to-back gives you the sense that as technology became faster and smaller and markets more vulnerable, the financial sector became a lot less fun, not just for Gekko, who spent many of the intervening years behind bars for insider trading, but also for director Oliver Stone and his collaborators, who seem so intent on pitching their own theories about exactly why the 2008 economic meltdown melted, on ensuring that we understand that greed is actually bad—in short, on preaching to the choir—that they forgot to invest their story with any compelling new characters.
While not a complete failure, this feels like a waste of a pretty brilliant opportunity to interrogate recent history through high stakes drama. To say that Douglas is the best thing in Money Never Sleeps isn’t much of a compliment. Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff have written an overly talky, cliché-laden script with too many blustery speeches, and the frustrating truth is that even Douglas gets stuck with bum lines, though he handles them with a lot more grace that Shia Labeouf, the idealistic young protégé/adversary and ostensible protagonist, a character barely coherent and most often dissolving into the scenery. Carey Mulligan meanwhile has to play not only LeBeouf’s fiancée but also Gekko’s very angry daughter, which means she spends most of the movie crying. It’s never explained how exactly a young woman who runs a successful Leftist news site and loathes her arbitrageur father fell in love with this money-obsessed young trader, which makes their inevitable break-up and reunion all the more puzzling. About the only actor who gets any mileage out of Money Never Sleeps is Eli Wallach, who’s 94, which means his Federal Reserve Board executive actually lived through the crash of’29. He’s barely in the movie yet encapsulates an awful lot of Stone’s thesis simply through the creepy shifts in attitude he brings to his final two scenes. Survival on Wall Street, this old pro implies, is about knowing when to stomp someone into the carpet and when to put on a big smile for the guy with the keys to the bank.
The title is ironic, though the movie itself at times seems to be not entirely aware of this, nonsensically launching its opening credit sequence with Johnny Cash’s rendition of the titular Neil Diamond ditty about a young man’s unease with cheating women, which is rather the opposite of what’s going on here. Six years after the mere mention of a potential heart problem prompted a late mid-life crisis and a catastrophic and very public personal meltdown, career car peddler Ben Kalmen (Michael Douglas) seems capable of just about anything other than being alone. He may have split from his wife Nancy (Susan Sarandon in a pretty thankless supporting role), but most nights he’s on the prowl for fresh flesh, preferably under 40, which according to Ben is the threshold beyond which the body “thickens.”
Not only do women support the sating of Ben’s carnal desires, or more to the point, his self-esteem, they also supply him with important business contacts—Ben’s heavily reliant on nepotism since being arrested for fraud. See, the problem isn’t so much that Ben has sex with the barely legal daughter (Imogen Poots, very good) of his rich girlfriend Jordan (Mary-Louise Parker), but that he was going out with the rich girlfriend in the first place. Jordan is only the most luscious embodiment—thickened or no—of Ben’s desperate cynicism in action. He’s using her, shamelessly. When push comes to shove comes to shit-kicking, which it will once that daughterly dalliance comes to light, it appears Ben will give up or sell-out just about anybody, including his adoring grandson, the subject of some emotional blackmail undertaken by Ben’s daughter, Susan (Jenna Fischer).
Solitary Man, which opens in Toronto tomorrow, was co-directed by journeyman scenarists Brian Koppelman and David Levien, who previously collaborated in this same capacity for 2001’s Knockaround Guys. I vaguely remember feeling some sympathy for that earlier picture despite its finally rather hackneyed ensemble crime caper premise, and that more or less lines up with my response to Solitary Man. I found myself rooting for the movie right to the end, enjoying certain audacious twists and its willingness to let its hero sink pretty low while ostensibly en route to redemption, and Douglas gives a beautifully modulated, unapologetic, and detailed performance. But Ben seems oblivious, his mind made up about what mercenary tactics one must engage in to succeed in life, which results in some fun, pretty crude, and not devoid of truth life lessons offered by Ben to gawky college sophomore Dan (Jesse Eisenberg). I think what ultimately makes Solitary Man less than satisfying is that it strives to embrace the virtues of friendship, family, and solidarity, yet, even in Nancy’s eleventh-hour offer of rescue from still greater disaster, the whole movie, like Ben, remains fundamentally solipsistic. Not a single character besides Ben emerges as anything more than a functionary.
