Although it debuted at number one last week (with a less than earth-shattering $19 million), Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps has been met with lukewarm notices from reviewers. The film's critics have generally found Stone's critique of Wall Street either underbaked, unfocused, incoherent or attenuated by the film's familial subplots. Even some of the film's positive reviewers agree with these critiques but have enjoyed it nonetheless.
In his review, New York's David Edelstein finds the film too cynical. "For all Stone’s vaunted political commitment, does he believe in anything beside the infinite corruptibility of humankind?" he asks. Edelstein's takes an impatient, almost scolding tone in his review, as though Stone -- not known for being a particularly subtle filmmaker -- was in the wrong for eschewing the almost Manichean vision of the world he offered in Platoon (1986), the first Wall Street (1987) or JFK (1991). Similarly, the dean of American popular film criticism, Roger Ebert "wish[es] it had been angrier.... [that] it had been outraged." Stone hasn't been the crusading filmmaker in quite awhile. He has made sympathetic if critical portraits of Republican presidents/progressive bogeymen Richard Nixon and George W. Bush, aesthetic exercises/critiques of modern media, and a study of the perseverance of New York's finest on September 11. His fannish interests in Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro continue to aggravate conservatives, but Stone is also quite aware that he is part of the capitalist system.
In other words, Stone has become a more nuanced director than his detractors, and probably his fans, give him credit for being. In this light, I suggest that Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps offers a more coherent, albeit ambiguous, critique of capitalism than most reviewers recognize. (Ebert, whose recent penchant for defending most of Hollywood's escapism, encourages one to forget that he can be an excellent film analyst, senses something along the lines of what I argue here when he muses that Stone seems more fascinated than outraged by the shenanigans that nearly destroyed the economy: "Is Stone suggesting this new reality has become embedded, and we're stuck with it?") To explain this point, the following review will necessarily involve spoilers, so be forewarned if you read below.
The film initially positions Gordon Gekko as a wiser Wall Street veteran who recognizes that the greed he touted back in the mid 1980s has morphed into something far worse that threatens the nation's future prosperity. In one of the film's centerpieces, a speech before rapt Fordham business students that is unfortunately played as a stand-up routine, Gekko glibly laments that greed has become the law and led America's banking industry to pursue indefensibly dangerous investments and/or profit from the collapse of the economy once those investments went belly-up. The audience looks upon Gekko with awe yet none of them seem disturbed by what he says about how financial markets operate. They treat him like the hero that Stone and Michael Douglas were disturbed to learn young bankers in the 1980s and 1990s considered him to be.
If the adoring audience represents in the aggregate a generation raised on the belief that greed is good, Jake Moore (Shia LeBoeuf; have we ever had a movie star whose last name is a hunk of meat?) represents it in the singular, and it is through him that Stone analyzes the way that greed has come to define Americans as human beings. To be sure, Jake is an idealist: he is funneling hundreds of millions to a green energy project, and he is engaged to a crusading left-wing blogger who also happens to be Gekko's daughter. But Jake, a promising investment banker until his firm collapses in the financial meltdown, is also through and through a capitalist, someone who believes in capitalism. Jake never questions the system; he may want to use it for more than amassing billions for conglomerates but his faith in the system never wavers. He knows of no other way to save the world than capitalism.
The downside of this faith is represented by his mother (Susan Sarandon), a real estate broker and former nurse who can't fathom returning to her previous career as someone who helps people. Deeply in debt because she can't sell the homes she'd hoped to flip, she continually borrows tens of thousands from her son, brushing off his complaints that he is barely making ends meet. When Mother's finances collapse and she is forced back into nursing, she spends her time trying to persuade senior citizens to buy property she still owns in Florida. Even a profession dedicated to unselfishly helping others has become a means to further her real estate business.
But it is Winnie (Carey Mulligan), Gekko's daughter, that most subtly demonstrates how deep the love of money has become in American society. She disdains the gaudy engagement ring that Jake gives her and is estranged from Gekko. But despite the lip service given to her disapproval of capitalism, Winnie is in love with an investment banker, and her estrangement from her father stems from the drug-overdose death of her brother, which she blames on Gekko's absence as a father. Indeed, she enjoys living with Jake in a spacious, gadget-encrusted loft (and later a comfy, tastefully antiqued brownstone), and writes for a political blog whose crummy design is belied by its hip offices. She also holds the title to a trust worth $100 million, put there by Gekko to hide some of his money from federal investigators. Winnie, who has kept the trust secret from Jake until Gekko reveals its existence, makes vague claims about donating it to charity but she clearly had no idea of what she would do with it. Eventually, this $100 million becomes the catalyst for Gekko to reunite with Winnie.
For the first two thirds of the film, Gekko seems to want nothing more than to reunite with Winnie. However, he manipulates her and Jake into signing the $100 million to him and then promptly absconds to London with the money to rebuild his financial empire. When Winnie learns of Jake's role in her father's scheme, she leaves him despite the fact that she is carrying his child. Jake feeds her a story that brings down the film's main villain (Josh Brolin) and tries to reconcile with her. As she hesitates, Gekko suddenly returns from London, announces that he has decided to capitalize the clean energy program that Jake supports, and notes what a swell couple Winnie and Jake make. To emphasize what a bald deus ex machina that Gekko has become, Stone concludes the film with scenes from the rooftop first birthday party for Winnie and Jake's child. Gekko is there, happily interacting with Jake and Winnie, the clean energy scientist, Jake's old investment banking friends and Winnie's fellow bloggers. All is fine: Gekko's betrayal has been forgotten and the nation is on the verge of a clean energy revolution.
But is it fine? As noted above, the system of American capitalism is never specifically questioned in the film -- it collapses and no meaningful remedy is presented. Things suddenly get better once Gekko returns with $100 million, a clear fantasy -- one underscored by the almost dreamlike mise-en-scene of the party. In the end, then, Stone seems to suggest that the heroes of the film decide to learn nothing from the economic havoc wreaked by the financial institutions for which Jake works, a havoc from which Gekko profits unapologetically. Money itself seems to solve all of the problems in the film: family, finance and energy are all brought together in one satisfied smile on a rooftop high above Manhattan.
The final image of the film indicates that, however happily Jake and Winnie and everyone seem to be with their status in life, that things will again pop. Throughout the film, Stone uses children playing with bubbles as a (rather heavy handed) metaphor for the financial crisis, and the film concludes with one of these bubbles wafting ever higher into the sky. It doesn't pop, but watching its gentle but unending climb into the clouds is akin to waiting for the other shoe to drop. A fragile web of soap and water, it simply can't continue its ascent.
So rather than offering a cloying romantic drama and a wan critique of Wall Street, Stone has asked, subtly and indirectly perhaps, a more probing question: What solution do we really want to this financial crisis? If the system is broken (as Stone has suggested), would that matter -- or would we take the material comforts of money, no matter where it comes from? Methinks Stone thinks we'd take the money. In a smart cameo, Charlie Sheen returns as Bud Fox as Charlie Sheen -- a millionaire with a hot model on each arm. Bud, of course, turned Gekko into the Feds in order to protect an airline that he later bought and then sold himself. Jake has the youthful optimism to complement Bud's idealist rejection of Gekko's avarice, but he doesn't have the idealist rejection. His idealism is his acceptance of Gekko's avarice, an idealism that converts Winnie as well. Jake and Winnie are already where Bud Fox needed twenty or so years to reach. They are the true homo economicus: not the rational actor in the market but rather the actor who is defined by their love of the market.
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