Review of Wall Street

Introduction

From ‘Platoon’ to ‘JFK’, Oliver Stone has found himself typecast as the official leftist chronicler of the US power matrix, from the highest status (Hopkins playing a haunted Tricky Dicky in ‘Nixon’) to the lowliest, discarded runt (James Wood’s Richard Boyle in ‘Salvador’) Stone’s films have come to symbolize a ballsy activism amongst the prosaic complaisance of the Hollywood system. ‘Wall Street’ fits in rather too nicely to this overview, as a cipher for impressionable naivete (Charlie Sheen) is seduced into systematically vaporizing his moral code by a demonic guru of capitalist dogma (Michael Douglas’ marvelously rasping Gordon Gekko). Re-released on a new special edition DVD (presumably to coincide with MGM’s special edition releases of ‘Platoon’ and ‘Salvador’, has ‘Wall Street’, a film that is very much a snapshot of it’s zeitgeist, held up to the test of time?

Video

Okay, so that loafing, deteriorating mid-80s Fox logo doesn’t bode well, but this new transfer is well above par for a film of this period. There was some traces of artifacting and minor print damage, but mostly this colourful and well-contrasted transfer accentuates Stone’s excitable and steely visual style.

Audio

A good 5.1 transfer. Being an almost totally dialogue driven movie, there’s not a huge amount of use of the rear channels other than for background atmosphere. However, the scenes on the trading floor, with their droning sound effects blending together have the detached hum of a battle.

Features

A typically involved commentary by Stone that is both enlightening and entertaining and a couple of priceless theatrical trailers. The centrepiece however is an excellent 45 minute doco on the making of ‘Wall Street’ with interviews with Stone, the Sheens and Douglas (the only noticeable exception being Darryl Hannah whose involvement in the project was unhappy to say the least). Given this is a retrospective, the comments about the shoot lie somewhere in between the pointless praising of MPKs and the ranting bitterness of post-release blues. The actors talk passionately about working with the aggressive and authoritarian Stone and the man himself defends his assaultive directing style, best illustrated by Sheen’s honest suggestion of a new name for his character: “What about Bud Fox?”, to which Stone replies: “Bud Fox? Sounds like Butt f***s!”

Conclusion

Given Stone’s warm-blooded embrace of a Fullerian battle mentality when it comes to making movies, it’s unsurprising that the results are often about as subtle as a brick in the face. What is surprising is the curiously trite morality so wholly embraced within a film like ‘Wall Street’. Alas, the film is a compelling, but shallow transaction: although not quite as shamelessly sanctimonious as ‘Platoon’, ‘Wall Street’ attempts to mimic the corny black-hat/white-hat platitudes of that film, a trap that Stone’s best have avoided through irresolvable complexity and bemusing ambiguity (‘Natural Born Killers’, ‘Nixon’.)

The performances are mixed, the patriarchs dueling for Bud’s affections (Martin Sheen and Michael Douglas), are excellent. Douglas’ slimy grace can now, with the benefit of hindsight, be admired for it’s subtle control and manipulation, and Sheen snr. delivers the only performance that really amounts to any kind of emotional honesty. The kids are less impressive, Sheen jnr is suitably bland and hollow (perfect for Stone to fill him with adolescent yearnings) which makes his all too frequent pouting and boasting rather less convincing and Hannah, in something of a train-crash of a performance, does her best to sink the entire movie.

However, with it’s sleek style, iconic villain and lean storytelling, the film is certainly better than the clammy re-mythologising of recent films like ‘Any Given Sunday’. Sadly though, ‘Wall Street’ does not wholly convince, Stone’s style mimics rather than satirizes the soulless embrace of 80s materialism (they make uncomfortable bedfellows) and an over-abundance of father figures lending well-oiled axioms and pearls of wisdom (four at last count) makes the film feel obvious, posed and top-heavy. Don’t get me wrong, ‘Wall Street’ is solidly entertaining and Douglas’ rolling diatribes are worth their weight in gold, but there’s only so long you can watch before the movie rings as hollow as the values it attacks.