Movie Review: Why Wall Street Slept

If you put 100 economists in a room and ask: honestly, who believes that government deregulation, Wall Street traders or hedge fund directors helped to create the meltdown of 2008? Most hands would raise. Add the question: who do you blame most? The responses will vary, but I don't think any would nominate Mother Nature. Now economists and laymen rightly believe that someone is to blame and that neither Wall Street, investment houses, nor banks were asleep. On the heels of the fall, people want change and they want it now. One prescient director, Oliver Stone, adds his voice to the chorus calling for change in the financial industry with his drama--Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.

Stone, one of the cognoscenti of film, sits in the director’s chair to enlighten us. And he has earned that rep and that right with film masterpieces, including JFK – a perfect piece of cinematography that even this great director has not reproduced with another film, either in its intensity or honesty.

JFK is nonfiction braided with honest speculation. His latest film, Money Never Sleeps, is a work of fiction that sets out to fix our fears about the involvement of government, bankers, and financiers who conspire and engineer the 2008 market meltdown with discrepant results. Powerful stuff that needs the full Oliver Stone treatment because former millionaires and billionaires jump from windows, drop before express trains, pull triggers, but few go to prison.

Global monetary loss without a governor to cap the speculation is the subject of this drama. However, I think the director did not really connect the message with its messenger even though the film opens with Gordon Gekko leaving prison. Because right away we know that he still doesn't get it. For Oliver Stone the lone messenger is the voice of Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko—again.

But his actions and the real shenanigans of traders are mostly muted in Money Never Sleeps. In Wall Street, we met the anguished men who nearly lost their factory at the hands of Gekko greed but brought back from the brink, by a reformed trader.  So Mr. Stone eschews the obvious thus there are no angry workers or bilked investors in the sequel. Instead he encapsulates the desperation and rolls it up in one old, rich white man, a brilliant conceit. Then this tired, broke, CEO Lewis Zabel (Academy Award winner Frank Langella) throws himself under the train in a crowded New York subway. Here’s your angst the director tells us. But is that film-opener enough? Were the producers and director of Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps thinking Academy recognition when they put this timely look at the 2008 Wall Street meltdown in a fall timeslot? I think so.

Article Author: Heloise

Author, writer, teacher, blogger, keeps a blog The Trough where she writes. She combines spirituality and politics as no other. She is a native of Chicago, who prefers walking as exercise. The author has a B.S., biology and M.A., anthropology, certified science and french teacher.
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