Both “Wall Street” and “Platoon,” Stone’s Vietnam war epic made the year before, star Charlie Sheen as an on-screen stand-in for Stone himself. In “Wall Street’s” DVD commentary, Stone explains that as a young man he could have gone to Wall Street or Vietnam. He chose Vietnam and part of his impetus for making “Wall Street” was to explore what would have happened if he had gone down the road not taken. The movie’s other direct ancestor, according to Stone, is his screenplay for the 1983 “Scarface,” about a drug dealer who sells all his loyalties and intimacies to become rich beyond his wildest dreams, and sadder and more joyless than he could have ever imagined.
In the DVD commentary Stone is surprisingly and casually candid about his dissatisfaction with Sheen and Hannah. The first, he claims, was too spaced out by “Platoon’s” success at the Oscars to give “Wall Street” the attention it deserves, and the second was too much at heart a hippie to get her head around a character so materialistic. Sheen’s performance is solid, if not as inspired as Douglas’, but it is sometimes hard to take him seriously because he was so brilliant—yes, brilliant—in the “Hot Shots!” films. There are several moments in “Wall Street” when I wondered if I was supposed to be laughing at him or not; I just about busted a gut when Bud used the phrase “everybody’s doing it” to try to convince a lawyer to take part in some shady transactions.
The movie is filled with fathers for Bud. His figurative fathers include Gekko, of course, and his old-school employer at his brokerage firm (Hal Holbrook), who dispenses tried-and-true paradigms that lack the appeal of Gekko’s Machiavellian get-rich-quick schemes. Bud is also joined by his biological father, played by Charlie Sheen’s real father Martin. He is a pro-labor machinist who has been working for the same airline for most of his adult life, and although that airline’s management is struggling he is willing to stick with it out of loyalty. While the big fight between the characters played by Charlie Sheen and Daryl Hannah is the most awkward scene in the movie, the few moments shared by Martin Sheen and Michael Douglas are so well-played that they become an iconic battle between the philosophies of the left and the right.
Some of “Wall Street’s” final act may seem a little Capra-esque, as the unions gang up to show the capitalist a thing or two. My only other complaint is the same half-complaint I made about “Better Luck Tomorrow:” both movies involve crime, and are still very good, but in the two cases I got the feeling that equally good, if not better movies could be made with the same characters and the same actors, but no criminal element. That’s the mystery of capitalism, as embodied by Gordon Gekko, that philosophy we love to hate and hate to love. It is a heartless, morally neutral, and entirely secular system that not only rewards individuals who are greedy but which financially rewards the entire society to which those greedy and successful individuals belong. Our pocketbooks, schools, bellies, and even charities are filled to abundance by the Gordon Gekkos of the world—but what if, in actually, they aren’t breaking any laws?
The Gekkos of the world may produce nothing, but their contribution to society is to keep every publicly-traded company running at maximum efficiency, otherwise they swoop in and destroy it as punishment for dragging down the economy. What if his ilk does not break the law, but is simply disgustingly greedy and then smug about it? We wish the Gekkos were evil, sometimes out of envy, sometimes out of the guilt of knowing that ferocious animal competition is the basis of human culture, and always has been. Maybe the greatest success of capitalism is that it puts our generation’s tyrannical scum behind desks instead of behind spears or chariots.
Finished April 1, 2004
Copyright © 2004 Friday & Saturday Night
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