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Wall Street (1987)
December 11, 1987
Film: Stone's 'Wall Street'
By VINCENT CANBY
Published: December 11, 1987
LEAD: OLIVER STONE'S ''Wall Street'' is a gentrified ''Everyman,'' an upscale morality tale to entertain achievers who don't want to lose touch with their moral centers, but still have it all.
OLIVER STONE'S ''Wall Street'' is a gentrified ''Everyman,'' an upscale morality tale to entertain achievers who don't want to lose touch with their moral centers, but still have it all.
It's about Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen), a bright, blindingly ambitious young Wall Street broker who, on the strength of one insider tip, gains a spectacular career but loses his soul, at least temporarily. More important, it's also about Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), a corporate raider for whom ''rich'' isn't ''$450,000 a year, but rich enough to have your own jet.''
''Wake up, pal,'' Gekko tells Fox. ''If you aren't inside, you're outside.'' Relying on information acquired by illegal hook and crook, Gekko buys up companies for peanuts and liquidates them for big bucks. ''I create nothing,'' he says with his usual candor. ''I own.''
Gordon Gekko is a good character. He's ruthless, ironic and, under the circumstances, completely practical, and Mr. Douglas, in the funniest, canniest performance of his career, plays him with the wit and charm of Old Scratch wearing an Italian-designer wardrobe.
Somewhere toward the middle of ''Wall Street,'' Gekko takes the microphone at the annual meeting of Teldar Paper, a company he's seeking to acquire, to deliver a pep talk on greed that - briefly - electrifies the movie. He sounds like Gore Vidal jazzing up the pages of The New York Review of Books.
''America has become a second-rate power,'' Gekko tells the Teldar shareholders. He cites the nation's horrendous trade imbalance and describes the backward state of domestic companies in competition with off-shore industry. Greed, he says, is all we have left, but greed is also what made America great. It's normal. It's healthy and it's what keeps the system going. By the time Gekko finishes, the stockholders in tennis shoes are cheering.
After that, ''Wall Street'' is all downhill.
Mr. Stone takes a dim view of the moral climate in which insider trading can flourish and corporate raiders are role models for the young. He comes out foursquare against a system that creates paper profits at the cost of diminishing products, services and jobs. Mr. Stone's heart is in the right place but, ultimately, his wit fails him. The movie crashes in a heap of platitudes that remind us that honesty is, after all, the best policy.
''Wall Street'' isn't a movie to make one think. It simply confirms what we all know we should think, while giving us a tantalizing, Sidney Sheldon-like peek into the boardrooms and bedrooms of the rich and powerful.
The movie's subject is a potentially great one that demands the sort of brainy, brazen, unsentimental common sense that illuminates ''Major Barbara'' and ''Heartbreak House.'' Shaw could write heroes and heroines that are a match for brilliant villains. Even at its best, ''Wall Street,'' which opens today at the Criterion and other theaters, is an unequal struggle. At its worst, it's a muddle.
Bud Fox, as written by Stanley Weiser and Mr. Stone, and as played by a spruced-up Charlie Sheen, is a softer, dopier version of Chris, Mr. Sheen's young soldier who's the conscience of Mr. Stone's far more effective, more efficient ''Platoon.'' Like Chris in ''Platoon,'' Bud Fox also has two ''fathers'' wrestling for his allegiance. In opposition to the magnetic, successful Gekko, there's Bud's dad, Carl (played by Martin Sheen, Charlie's real-life father), an airline mechanic and staunch union man who sees Gekko as the Evil One he is.
To those of us outside Wall Street, Bud's rise to the top looks remarkably easy and is, essentially, not very dramatic. However, Mr. Stone has dressed up the movie with an exceptionally handsome (and sometimes satiric) physical production, a pounding soundtrack score, a camera so restless and edgy that it defines Bud Fox's ambition better than the screenplay does, and a lot of fast talk and Big Business arcana that give the movie a certain excitement and tension.
When Mr. Douglas is not at the center of the screen, the movie loses its grit. There's a possibly very funny sequence in which we see Daryl Hannah, as a high-class interior designer (''I'd like to do for furniture what Laura Ashley did for fabrics''), spending thousands to give Bud Fox's new penthouse-condo a look of chic dishevelment. Yet the characters aren't sharply enough defined to make the situation caustic. The performances don't help. Mr. Sheen lacks the necessary, nervy intelligence and Miss Hannah has the screen presence of a giant throw-pillow.
By trotting out such real-life Manhattan characters as James Rosenquist, the painter, and Richard Feigen, the art dealer, the movie appears to be celebrating the very world into which Bud Fox has moved, finally, with such qualms.
After he's reached the pinnacle of his gaudy success, Bud arises from the bed he's been sharing with Miss Hannah to address the Upper East Side dawn from his penthouse terrace. It's supposed to be a moment of solemn introspection, but when he asks the sun, ''Who am I?,'' rude answers may come from the back of the theater. As in Cecil B. DeMille's biblical epics, wickedness is a lot more attractive than perfunctory moralizing.
The generally excellent supporting cast includes Sean Young (''No Way Out''), who appears in a couple of scenes as Mr. Douglas's wife.
The confusion at the heart of the film may be exemplified in the names with which Mr. Stone has saddled his two principal characters. The movie boils down to Fox versus Gekko. We're all supposed to understand that a fox is a flesh-eating mammal thought to be ''sly and crafty'' (Webster's phrase). But what about Gekko?
In fact, a gecko is a harmless tropical lizard. With suction-cup feet, it can walk across ceilings and, though it looks as ferocious as a miniature crocodile (up to 8, 10 or 12 inches long), it mostly hides during the day, coming out at night to eat flies, mosquitoes and other insects. Its droppings are annoying, but the gecko is a part of the natural order of things.
If Gordon Gekko is understood this way, then ''Wall Street'' is a lot more subversive than maybe even Mr. Stone realizes. The Cast WALL STREET, directed by Oliver Stone; written by Stanley Weiser and Mr. Stone; director of photography, Robert Richardson; film editor, Claire Simpson; music by Stewart Copeland; production designer, Stephen Hendrickson; produced by Edward R. Pressman; released by 20th Century-Fox Film Corporation. At Criterion Center, Broadway between 44th and 45th Streets; Gotham Cinema, Third Avenue at 58th Street; 86th Street East Twin, between Second and Third Avenues; Olympia Cinemas, Broadway at 107th Street; Movieland Eighth Street, at University Place. Running time: 120 minutes. This film is rated R. Gordon Gekko... Michael Douglas Bud Fox... Charlie Sheen Darien Taylor... Daryl Hannah Lou Mannheim... Hal Holbrook Sir Larry Wildman... Terence Stamp Carl Fox... Martin Sheen Kate Gekko... Sean Young Marvin... John C. McGinley Ollie... Josh Mostel Stone Livingston... Paul Guilfoyle Realtor... Sylvia Miles Mrs. Fox... Millie Perkins Cromwell... Richard Dysart Bidder at Auction... Richard Feigen Artist at Auction... James Rosenquist
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