133) Wall Street

Wall Street (1987)


Director: Oliver Stone

Starring: Michael Douglas, Charlie Sheen, Daryl Hannah, Martin Sheen, John C. McGinley, Terence Stamp, Sean Young

I'm pretty keen to see Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps (even though I'm reasonably sure that it is going to be disappointing), but I wanted rewatch the original first. I saw it a few years ago but didn't have really strong memories of it and figured to get the most out of the sequel I would probably need to remember certain details from the original.

Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) is a low level stock broker who spends his days cold calling people to encourage them to invest. His idol is high flying investor Gordon Gekko (Douglas). He longs to land an account for a big fish like Gekko. Every day Fox rings Gekko's office to try and arrange an appointment and when he shows up at Gekko's office on his birthday with a gift of Havana cigars, Gekko's favourite, he is granted an audience. Put on the spot for a tip, Fox gives Gekko some inside information regarding a small airline, Blue Star, which he obtained from his father (Martin Sheen), who works there. This information makes Gekko a lot of money so he opens an account with Fox, but Fox quickly discovers that doing business the Gekko way means sidestepping not only your morals, but the law.

I find it's really difficult to watch Charlie Sheen in films from this era with all the baggage that comes with Sheen now. In the 1980s when you thought Charlie Sheen, personally you thought Martin Sheen's son and professionally you thought Platoon and Wall Street. Pretty respectable. When you think Charlie Sheen now, professionally you think Two and a Half Men, and personally you think womanising sex addict/wife beater/drug rehab frequent visitor. It makes it hard to get in the mindset of taking him seriously again.

One of the great things about this film is that you don't really have to know the stock market to follow what is going on. I'm not an economically minded person (hence the reason I've spent the last seven years of my life at university studying film) and I didn't struggle to grasp what was being discussed. Stone does a great job of making the economic wheeling and dealing that is going on sound really complicated but at the same time making sure the viewer never gets left behind. At the very least you always know the motivation: greed. So even if there are moments you don't quite know what is happening, you still know why it is happening.

Gordon Gekko is one of those strange characters who seem to become cult heroes. You hear of stock brokers who idolise Gekko. I say it's strange, because if you've seen the movie you know that things don't necessarily work out for him. Tony Montana from Scarface is the other one that springs to mind. He is an idolised figure in the hip hop community. People want to be like him, and you just want to ask them "Have you actually watched through to the end of the movie?"

There are certain actresses (I find it is mainly actresses) who for me seem to sum up a decade. They aren't necessarily the biggest stars of that decade, just someone who's fame seemed to be tied to a certain period of time. Faye Dunaway is late 1960s-early 1970s, Meg Ryan is 1990s and Daryl Hannah is 1980s. I've never really understood the appeal of Daryl Hannah. She's never blown me away with a great performance, she doesn't strike me as being stunningly attractive, but I think most of all it is just I can't get past the fact that Daryl is not a particularly feminine name. When I think 'Daryl', I think Daryl Somers from 'Hey, Hey, It's Saturday!' and Daryl Kerrigan from The Castle.

Wall Street isn't so much a film about Wall Street. It is a film about capitalism, more specifically, it is a film about the value system behind it which places profit and wealth above everything else. It is a film about greed. It came out at a very poignant time for such a message in the late 1980s, giving the film a level of relevance that Stone is no doubt trying to recreate by bringing the sequel out just after the global financial crisis. There is nothing particularly subtle about the film, the characters, while brilliantly performed, are obvious caricatures, and Stone isn't afraid to really beat you over the head with his message at times, but it is an iconic and important film, and one of Stone's best.