Wall Street : Money Never Sleeps

Wall Street : Money Never Sleeps




This is the first movie I saw on the big screen this year so I might as well revisit it with you.

As a sequel of the first 1987 Wall Street movie and made relevant with a poetic treatise of the real 2008 financial crisis, this film is worth writing about.

Manhattan is postcard pretty as ever as the financial center of the universe.

The screenplay is made familiar by a show of the state of the art of the financial markets and some of our current concerns such as energy requirements of the future and progressive non profit websites that are tools to change the world for the better for our children and the next generations.

This Oliver Stone ( 1987 Wall Street JFK & Nixon fame ) film opens with Gordon Gekko ( Michael Douglas) being released after eight years in jail for financial fraud, which as the character explains later in the film, is actually a much larger crime than the insider trading crime, the initial transgression that we saw at the end of the first Wall Street film.

After seven years we find Gekko a star again as the author of a best seller book : Is Greed Good?

But, the angst of the life of Gekko is mostly about his estrangement with Winnie ( Carey Mulligan), his daughter who blogs in a non profit website, that started to get 50,000 hits or website visits per day and ultimately got 200,000 hits per day when indications for market corrections were published.

The daughter blames the absentee Gekko in jail for all the tragic events in their dysfunctional post modern family : a brother who died due to drug overdose and a mother who went mad.

The partner of Winnie is Jake Moore ( Shia LaBeouf) an energy investment expert working in Wall Street who thinks that energy fusion using water, through hydrogen fusion, is the next “bubble” that will solve our energy problems for the next generations.

The poetic screenplay ( Allan Loeb & Stephen Schiff ) is actually narrated from the point of view of Jake, a protégé of Lou ( Frank Langella of Nixon fame), who commits suicide after his financial investment bank falls. With the help of Gekko, Jake finds out how and why the company of his mentor went bankrupt.

The next scenes are about the so called “ market corrections” in the financial meltdown that is ailing Wall Street. These corrections largely use the legal and justice system structures.

This film tries to explain in scenes, not unlike the television clips we saw in the real life 2008 financial crisis, what is wrong with our financial markets :people borrowing to the hilt, all of the profits coming from financial services such as trading, leveraging, hedge funding and some of these funds are used to finance industrial military weapons of mass destruction ( WMD) and that only about almost a hundred people in the world control these transactions.

That speculation is the mother of all evil.
Gekko describes the current Ninja generation as the generation with “no income, no job and no assets.” The solutions to all these in the words of Gekko are three words “Buy My Book” as the answers can be found in his best selling book.

Gekko, while introspecting in jail felt that he was the lone sane man inside and everyone and all out of prison were crazy.

The conflict in the movie is the struggle of Jake to make the corrections in the cancerous financial market mess, not unlike the real life 2008 financial mess that as we saw was bailed out by the United States treasury in what was called the billions worth “stimulus package.”

The concept of “ moral hazard” is explained: “someone gets your money and that someone is not responsible for it.”
The villain in Bretton James ( Josh Brolin) is exposed; the wall street crook was found committing securities fraud : trading for his own account and betting against the market he was making.

One of the scenes described by A.O. Scott in the New York Times movie review, that also caught my fancy was the fundraiser soiree event where one finds the beautiful people of Manhattan dressed in designer clothes and the camera of Rodrigo Prieto, director of photography, zoomed in on the bulky & beautiful earrings of the women in gorgeous gowns.

 It was such an ostentatious display of wealth for charity.

The beauty and the beast that is Manhattan & Wall Street as further described
by A.O. Scott is the intersection of “ material excess…. with genuine beauty”
and that “ what went wrong” in the financial center can be explained in two words: “ human nature.”