Titans of finance with the ethical code of gangsters. essay
Joe Nocera -
Twenty-three years ago, Oliver Stone made the most memorable business movie of all: “Wall Street,” which captured an era and an ethos. Now the left-leaning, blunt-talking director was trying to explain why his new movie, “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” was not the fictionalized version of the financial crisis of 2008 I had expected.
“I don’t know how you show a credit default swap on the screen,” Mr. Stone said. It just couldn’t be done, he said.
The crisis, he insisted, was merely meant to be the backdrop for a story about a handful of “complex” people — an older, wiser Gordon Gekko among them — who just happened to be operating on Wall Street around September 2008.
“People won’t watch a business movie,” Mr. Stone said. The more he protested, the more he sounded like a man who hadn’t pulled off what he had set out to accomplish and was now making excuses.
The original “Wall Street” created indelible images: Gordon Gekko, played with delirious vigor by Michael Douglas, barking out buy and sell orders that make or break companies and competitors.
His acolyte, Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen), who gains Gekko’s favor by feeding him inside information.
The famous “greed is good” speech Gekko delivers to the hapless directors of a company that has become his latest prey.
The original “Wall Street,” Mr. Stone told me, “was about a kid who sells out his father.” True enough. But the events that characterized Wall Street in the 1980s were a lot more than a backdrop.
They were crucial to the plot. The movie was built around insider trading and the predations of the hostile takeover movement.
Ivan Boesky, who went to jail for insider trading, made the original “greed is good” speech. Michael Milken, the inspiration, in part, for Gekko, was known as the “junk bond king” and financed the hostile takeover movement.
In “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” many of the characters — and firms — are stand-ins for real people and real companies. Frank Langella’s character is based on Jimmy Cayne, the former chief executive of Bear Stearns. Josh Brolin, who plays the villain, heads Churchill Schwartz, which is modeled on Goldman Sachs, ruthlessly taking advantage of competitors.
And though Mr. Douglas returns as Gordon Gekko, he spends much of the film predicting the coming cataclysm.
The problem is that, with rare exception, the characters merely talk about the things that helped bring the world’s financial system to the brink. Gekko’s sermons have the quality of a Greek chorus, describing crucial events that we never see.
Instead, the plot revolves around the efforts of a young investment banker, Jake Moore (Shia LaBeouf), to get financing for an earnest clean-energy company.
Even the one big exception is instructive.
With Mr. Langella’s firm on the brink of failure, the New York Federal Reserve calls together all the Wall Street barons in the hope of finding a way to save the firm. (Mr. Brolin’s company winds up buying it cheaply, not unlike the way J.P. Morgan bought Bear Stearns for practically nothing.)
But Mr. Stone told me he worried that devoting so much screen time to those meetings — seven minutes in all — could cost him some of his audience. So he embellished them so much that they resemble a gathering of mobsters in “The Godfather.”
The events that took place on Wall Street from the summer of 2007 to the fall of 2008, when even mighty Goldman Sachs’s survival was in doubt, were inherently dramatic.
Much of the trading that went on in the prelude to the crisis utterly lacked any redeeming virtue.
Villains abounded. Was it really so impossible to build a movie script out of this material?
Olaf Rogge, a big-time London money manager who was an adviser to the film, said he was disappointed.
“He missed a beautiful opportunity,” Mr. Rogge said of the director. “He could have pointed out how we were five minutes from the brink of anarchy.”
There is something a little unfair in criticizing a director for not making the film you had hoped he would make. But Mr. Stone looked the crisis straight in the eye — and blinked.
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