Oliver Stone has been making films for 25 years, but he’s only made one (Heaven & Earth) with a woman in the lead role, and even there she was very much a victim; it takes some thinking to come up with strong female characters in the Stone oeuvre, and pickings are likely to be slim – maybe Angelina Jolie as Alexander the Great’s mum in Alexander, unless we count psycho Mallory in Natural Born Killers. “Money is the bitch that never sleeps,” says Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) in Stone’s latest film – a sequel to one of his first films, the 1987 Wall Street – and I’m not sure what that means but given (a) the casual use of ‘bitch’ and (b) the suggestion that bitches are only acceptable when they’re asleep, it’s fair to say that Stone hasn’t gone all New Man-ish. Once you accept that, Money Never Sleeps is a lively testosterone-fest and (why not) even a sharp comment on America’s recent financial crisis.
The problem is Gordon Gekko – not just what he is (venal, cynical, ruthless) but how the film views him, which is also how Wall Street viewed him back in ’87. The difference is that, then, his amoral charisma and famous motto – “Greed is good” – encapsulated his era, the yuppie 80s, whereas now he stands outside his era; he can see Wall Street for the den of thieves it is, even as he schemes to exploit it. But he’s once again the smartest person in the film, and Stone (himself the son of a successful Wall Street stockbroker) loves him too much to mete out the destruction he deserves. I won’t spoil the ending, but our final glimpse of Gekko is too much; we should’ve left him back in London, with his computers and Pyrrhic victories.
Actually, Gekko barely appears for much of the opening half-hour. We see him released from jail, an old man with no-one to meet him on the outside – he’s also reunited with his personal possessions, including a 20th-century mobile phone the size of a brick – but the focus then shifts to Jake (Shia LaBeouf), a young trader who gets caught up in the Wall Street meltdown and seeks revenge for the death-by-suicide of his mentor, destroyed by his fellow sharks. Jake also happens to be dating Gekko’s estranged daughter (Carey Mulligan) – but she’s just a woman so we don’t really care about her, except insofar as her presence draws Gekko and Jake together.
Stone’s work oozes machismo, from the constant obsession with male relationships – fathers and sons, powerful men deep in negotiations around a conference table – to the exuberant aggression of his style. Part of the reason why Money Never Sleeps is so enjoyable is because Stone is so enthusiastic with the visuals, throwing in split-screen, double exposure (Stock Exchange charts and figures superimposed on people’s faces), a random iris-in and lots of bubbles, standing in for the Wall Street bubble. The only problem with making the film so macho is LeBeouf, who never really seems to belong. The first Wall Street had no such problems because Charlie Sheen (who returns in a cameo) was a naïf, an innocent – but Shia’s character is supposedly a brilliant trader, and it doesn’t work because he’s blown off the screen by Josh Brolin as his main antagonist.
Brolin, who previously played George Bush in Stone’s W., is irresistible here, whether engaging in deliberate humiliation (of the aforementioned mentor, who promptly kills himself) or coolly rebutting Shia’s accusations, rolling a big cigar as he does so. He and Douglas, who gets most of the best lines – telling a young audience they’re the NINJA Generation: “No Income, No Jobs, No Assets” – are the main attractions, and it’s clear Stone feels most at home with these supremely self-confident rascals; yet the film is also a critique, echoing Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story in making clear that the financial meltdown was the result of a national madness that went far beyond Wall Street.
In the end, Money Never Sleeps is too bouncy – and too damn enjoyable – to be much of a rant. It tries to do too much, and it’s overlong by about 20 minutes. Yet it does include the symbolic character of Jake’s mother, played by Susan Sarandon – a nurse who gets caught up in the capitalist frenzy, becoming a real-estate agent and briefly making loadsamoney before the bubble catches up with her. “Did you think prices would go up in perpetuity?” asks Shia, exasperated. Rumours that Stone’s original script had him adding ‘What’s a woman doing in a man’s world anyway?’ remain unconfirmed.
