November 21, 2008: Wall Street
Wall Street (1987) is a movie I’ve seen many times over the years, often in pieces, since it’s an example of a movie I can turn on to watch a certain scene, and find myself engrossed until the end. On this particular occasion I watched the film in several installments over the space of a week. The noted viewing dates in my reviews always refer to the date on which I finished watching a movie.
I seem to have always had a love-hate relationship with Oliver Stone’s films, as they have been an integral part of the backdrop of my viewing for years. It was a long time before I came to appreciate Best Picture and Best Director Oscar winner Platoon (1986), though I’ve come around to it in recent years. I don’t particularly seek out his other Best Director Oscar-winner, Born on the Fourth of July, but it’s worth revisiting once every decade or so. I saw JFK on a first date, Natural Born Killers was my introduction to my favourite theatre in Toronto, and Wall Street struck a chord with me from the first time I saw it in the theatre way back when it was first released and I knew nothing about what was going on. However, I find The Doors to be basically unwatchable, Any Given Sunday was a bit too footballish for my tastes despite some promise, and my second viewing of U-Turn several years after its release revealed it to be far more blatantly Stone-indulgent than I had recalled.
This movie centres (or does it?) around Charlie Sheen playing Bud Fox, a young stock broker in the mid-1980s, before the unraveling and the big crash, struggling to break free of the nickel-and-dime clients he’s forced to work with, and wanting to “bag the elephant” – to get on the brokerage team of a seriously rich player in the mergers and acquisitions which were so popular at the time. Gordon Gekko (an Oscar-winning role for Michael Douglas) is just such an elephant, and Bud’s persistence, passing him through and far beyond a pivotal and morally-questionable turning point, gets him on the team and propels him into the life he’d always imagined for himself. But greed has a habit of making people take things too far, and it’s even harder when family members are directly affected. Bud is nominally the lead character in this story, but Gordon Gekko proves to be the core force driving it all, and Bud is starkly painted as not being quite the power player he imagines himself to be.
Oliver Stone’s father was an actual New York Stock Exchange trader on the floor of the exchange, so Stone had been exposed to this environment for many years and this film was something of a tribute to his father, who passed away the year before it was released.
John C. McGinley, perhaps better known to the current generation as one of “the Bobs” in the 1999 film Office Space, is a regular player in Oliver Stone’s films, having portrayed one of the soldiers in Platoon in addition to appearing in later films in much smaller roles. In Wall Street, he plays a nerdy and enthusiastic co-worker of Bud’s. I’ve always felt that he was better cast in this role than in Platoon, and I think he adds playful energy to the stockbroker’s office scenes in this film.
The timing of the release of Wall Street was extraordinarily convenient. The setting of the film is noted as being 1985, two years before the late-1987 release. This was because of the desire to set it before the insider trading scandals which began to surface in 1985 and 1986. The release date of the film also fell mere months after the stock market crash of October 1987, perhaps leading to greater interest in the film, since the stock market focus at that point made it timely in a way that would have been impossible to plan.
I really enjoy this film, but it’s not perhaps the most accessible storyline, theme or presentation. Absent are a lot of Oliver Stone’s stylistic trademarks, which will appeal to some (including me). An iconic performance from Michael Douglas, and a tight script with lots of high finance and intrigue reveling in the excesses of the 1980s, make this a winner for me.
Post a Comment