Cannes 2010: Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

I was going to lead up to it, but, damn I'm going to start with Oliver Stone's Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps. Actually, the line in the movie is “Money is a bitch that never sleeps”, but somehow that never made it onto the poster. And to get to the point, I thought it was good; it has its flaws but somehow the film manages to smuggle them past you, even though some of them really are quite outrageous (more of that later). I found myself wondering if Stone had seen Bad Lieutenant while he was in Venice with his 2009 documentary South Of The Border, because it shares some of Werner Herzog's audacity with form, in that it's an unashamed work of entertainment that celebrates all the things that drama demands and does not back away from what some might spell c-l-i-c-h-e-s.

It begins with some nicely observed sight gags. Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) is getting out of prison after a harsh (and unfairly harsh, it seems) stint in jail for insider dealing. He is given his possessions back – a flash money clip with no money in it and a mobile phone the size of housebrick – and, once outside, a stretch limo we assume has been sent to collect him turns out to belong to a swaggering black gangster. This Gekko, we learned, has turned his back on his old lifestyle, having written a book called Is Greed Good? (do you see what they did there?) and is warning everyone who will listen that the economy is in a bad way.

The year is 2008, in the run-up to the recent financial meltdown, and the next character we meet is Gordon's daughter, Winnie (Carey Mulligan). Winnie is dating an ambitious young trader, Jacob Moore (Shia LaBeouf), who is intrigued when the news of her father's release is broken on a morning TV news show. Winnie is appalled, makes Jacob switch the TV off, and the pair, clearly a close couple, set off for work: Jacob to his company, run his his ageing mentor Lou (Frank Langella) and Winnie to Washington for a business trip in association with a not-for-profit website she is founding, called Frozen Truth. While Winnie is away, Jacob makes contact with Gekko, and the pair form an unlikely alliance: Jacob is starstruck, Gekko sees a kindred spirit. But when she finds out, Winnie is furious and storms out of a dinner date with Jacob and her father that's supposed to clear the air. Jacob follows her out into the street to persuade her to return to the table, but, instead, she begs him, ominously, “Don't go back in there, Jake. He's going to hurt us.”

Though plenty else happens – Jacob is a good guy, looking to promote “clean” energy; his realtor mother (Susan Sarandon) keeps spongeing off him; and Josh Brolin has a scene-stealing supporting role as the nemesis who unites Jacob and Gekko against him – this really is the nub of the film. Can Gekko be trusted? Or, as I think Stone has put it, can a leopard really change its spots? This tension is played out beautifully, and Douglas really doesn't overdo it. Into this family drama, Stone works in some nicely observed points about the economy that are somewhat laboured at times – Gekko, in a rented condo, mysteriously has a painting of some tulips that enables him to lecture Jacob about he tulip futures debacle of the 17th-century (Google “tulipmania”; the filmmakers pretty much did). But the constant bombardment of lingo, all the talk of shorting, toxic debts and derivatives, gives the film an energy that actually accents the human side of this story. Stone makes the point that America's, and the world's, boom-and-bust economy cycle is an age-old game that has more to do with human powerplay and greed than money, a pattern that will eventually bust us so badly there'll be no coming back. And far from demonising the traders and the world that drove Bud Fox out of the original, Stone allows Jacob Moore some grace, arguing for ethical trading as an alternative.

At 2hrs 16, the film is a little ungainly, and has trouble wrapping up so many subplots at the end, but Stone packs an awful lot in. Mulligan gets some space to prove there's more where An Education came from; Brolin brings the meat of the story, which reveals some of the secrets of Gekko's downfall; and Eli Wallach makes a great cameo as an ageing trader (archly accompanied by a running gag in the movie: Jacob's ringtone is the theme from The Good, The Bad And The Ugly). The whole film, though, is in Gordon Gekko's shadow, and Douglas doesn't disappoint. And while Stone gives him the kind of pantomime-villain dialogue that has been the undoing of many a lesser movie (think Hannibal), and fills the movie with some very familiar dramatic devices, Wall Street 2 emerges as a film that has fun with its doom-mongering. Oliver Stone is taking us to hell on a hayride, and there's a lot to enjoy along the way.