Wall Street: Money never sleeps

Hollywood and the cash crisis

WALL STREET: MONEY NEVER SLEEPS

Director: Oliver Stone

Cert. 12A

Anybody who found the original movie Wall Street too cold and too fast should enjoy this timely sequel.

As with the 1987 film, it is not necessary to have a knowledge of international finance to follow the plot. This time around we meet Jake Moore, a young trader dating the daughter of the infamous Gordon Gekko.

Love of money

The film is as much a homage to the original as it is a sequel, as if director Oliver Stone made it partly for nostalgic reasons. Another reason for making it was to have Gekko explain (in his thrillingly cold layman’s terms), the causes and effects of the recent real world financial crisis.

What makes the film most worthwhile though, is that we see another side to Gekko’s character. He claims to have learnt that the most valuable commodity is not money, but time. This could directly be compared to Jesus’s words, telling us that we shouldn’t store up treasures on earth, but in heaven, where they will last forever. Add to that ‘the love of money is the root of all evil’, and Gekko must be the most devilish villain in film history!

Vile selfishness

In 1987 countless fans of Gekko’s character were inspired to make money on the stock market, a fact which troubled actor Michael Douglas deeply, since the character was intended as an exposé of the ugliness of such greed. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps appears to be a gracious response to that reaction, simultaneously making the vileness of such selfishness even clearer, while offering some hope of redemption from it.

It seems to give the message that the day we stop judging is the day we start healing; and, although Stone is damning, to some extent, of the moral vacuum which allows a privileged few to get rich by wasting other people’s money, this is one of his least judgmental films. ‘We’re all mixed bags’, Gekko says, as he asks his daughter for forgiveness.

Covering the bases

Quietly, this a very fulfilling picture, covering all the bases of commenting on current global finance, respecting the original, and bringing something new and positive to the table.

Peter D. Marsay, filmmaker/writer