Screening out of competition at Cannes, Oliver Stone's Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps was shown to journalists this morning -- and yet again another gargantuan Hollywood movie gets a drubbing from the press. But hey, at least this film is timely and opened up an Oliver Stone lecture on economics.
Day three of Cannes got underway with a morning press screening, and "sell" seemed to be the general consensus among critics and journalists as they walked out. Perhaps the most interest generated by the film wasn't its acting or writing (both solidly mediocre), but simply in the timing. Coming on the heels of the investigation into the nefarious trading practices at Goldman Sachs, the movie sparked intense debate on the U.S. financial system and the ways in which banking and capitalism have transformed over the past 50 years.
The latest Wall Street opens in 2008, when we see a broken Gekko being released from prison. The stretch limo waiting outside isn't for him (it's for a rapper), so he's relegated to hailing a cab to get home. This time the Bud Fox character is now Jacob Moore (Shia LaBoeuf), a green energy-loving Wall Street trader who's taken up with Gekko's fetching daughter, played by Carey Mulligan. The plot then pretty much plays right out of any of a number of books chronicling the financial meltdown of 2008, with a heaping dose of familial angst. Critic Harlan Jacobson of Talkcinema.com noted the film seems eerily reminiscent of the U.S. economy's undoing found in Andrew Ross Sorkin's book Too Big to Fail.
Stone offered his thoughts on the financial markets at a press conference immediately following the film. In attendance with Stone were Josh Brolin, Frank Langella, LaBoeuf, Mulligan, and producers Eric Kopeloff and Edward Pressman. Sounding at times more like an economics professor than filmmaker, Stone fielded a question about finance by echoing a similar line delivered by George W. Bush in July 2008.
"We got drunk," he said in explaining the excesses of Wall Street. "In 1987, I thought the [financial] system would correct itself. But it didn't. It got worse. The labor wages of the American worker flattened out in 1973. But the productivity of the United States went way up. So there was a tremendous gap between who made money and who didn't make money."
Stone was also asked specifically about capitalism, and not surprisingly, didn't give an answer that would meet with approval from the likes of Bill O'Reilly or Sean Hannity. "I'm confused as are many people in the world right now whether capitalism in its present form can work," said Stone, who recently completed the documentary South of the Border which chronicles the rise to power of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and other South American presidents. "It seems not," he concluded. "It seems that [capitalism] is excessive and unregulated."