Report From Cannes: Oliver Stone is back in business
Reporting from Cannes, France
Addressing reporters at the Cannes Film Festival on Saturday, filmmaker Oliver Stone was rattling off a series of facts and figures about the contemporary banking industry when he almost seemed to catch himself in his own wonkishess.
FOR THE RECORD:
Oliver Stone: An article about Oliver Stone in Monday’s Calendar section said the character played by Charlie Sheen in Stone’s 1987 film “Wall Street” was named Bud Cox. The character was Bud Fox. —
“It’s gigantic subject matter, but it’s documentary subject matter,” Stone said about some of the themes running through “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” the follow-up to his era-defining hit that uses the recent financial meltdown as a backdrop for his conflicted characters. “You have to find that balance between the story of these people and the economics of the collapse.”
With a screenplay by Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff, “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” which premiered this past weekend in Cannes to mixed but mostly favorable reviews, is perhaps the most anomalous star-driven movie to be released in years. On one level, it’s a studio sequel featuring both built-in brand recognition and actors who can lure filmgoers 30 and younger — in other words, the same formula employed by the dozens of superhero and action movies that Hollywood churns out with inexhaustible regularity.
But the Fox film is also a serious movie about heady topics — big themes like the perils of greed and the intersection of money and family and also more coneheaded subjects such as government bailouts and credit-default swaps. In other words, if Greek tragedies were written by the producers of CNBC, they would look something like this film. “The studios don’t make many movies like this,” says star Michael Douglas, speaking of a project that had been developed for years but was jumpstarted by the 2008 financial crash.
But this paradox raises, both creatively and in the marketplace, a key question: Can a film at once serve as a policy document and commercial entertainment?
Released in 1987 and set in the era of go-go trading and corporate raiding, the original “Wall Street” told of a brash young trader named Bud Cox ( Charlie Sheen), unctuous kingpin Gordon Gekko (Douglas, who won a best-actor Oscar) and the scheming that culminates in Cox doing the right thing and Gekko being sent to jail for his sins. Gekko’s trademark line, “Greed is good,” was intended as a sly comment on the excesses of the era, although to many who watched it, the phrase, like the movie itself, was taken as a glamorization of that world as much as a condemnation of it.
The new film starts with Gekko’s 2001 release from jail, before flashing forward seven years to an elaborate plot involving a young trader named Jacob Moore ( Shia LaBeouf). Moore has (some) scruples but is rising in a world that just happens to be collapsing as investment banks run by Louis Zabel and Bretton James ( Frank Langella and Josh Brolin) teeter under the weight of the 2008 financial crisis.
The story increasingly weaves in Gekko — who also happens to be the father of Moore’s fiancé ( Carey Mulligan) — and who may be seeking either redemption or something more ominous.
In being given the chance to make a sequel, Stone has been granted a kind of filmmaking mulligan — a chance to update a movie that might otherwise seem dated in today’s ever-more-treacherous financial world.
As both he and Douglas note, much of the traders’ criminal activity from the first film is now quasi-legal, which in turn has yielded some ugly results. Stone, who like the others was speaking from a balcony overlooking the French Riviera at the über-elegant Hotel du Cap — the very place that Gordon Gekko himself might vacation — explained the impetus for the new film as: “I showed the madness of the free-market experiment in 1987, but I think now we reached the end of that experiment.”
At the same time, the movie — for what its principals say are reasons of accuracy as well as audience sympathy — can’t go too far in turning the Wall Street moguls into monsters. “It’s really easy to just look at the big picture and say ‘Oh, wow, there are people not eating and Lloyd Blankfein is getting a $100-million bonus?’ ” LaBeouf says. “And then you meet a man like George Soros and your opinion changes. You meet a [ Warren] Buffett or a [ Paul] Volcker, and you see these are good men who have scruples, who are disciplined, who think there’s more to it than just a dollar. They’re not all villains and Darth Vader.”
Originally scheduled for an April release — it would have coincided almost exactly with news of the government’s fraud lawsuit against Goldman Sachs — “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” will now hit theaters Sept. 24, a shift designed to allow the movie a splashy premiere in Cannes. But Stone and Douglas say they believe there will be plenty in the upcoming news to fuel interest in the film even in the fall.
Nevertheless, the balance between the news and fictional drama can be a delicate one, and few understand that better than Stone himself. At 63, newly married and with young children, the famously hard-nosed director is said by many of his stars to have mellowed, even as both his interviews and his films (he also is set to release “South of the Border,” which aims to show another side of South American leaders) suggest a man willing to tangle with all manner of political and social topics. During an interview, he moves between disbelieving jibes about the hypocrisies of the business sector — “CEOs are being paid 500 times what workers are being paid; there should be a law against that; it’s a crime” — and the intricacies of the U.S. electoral system.
“This is a man who still cares passionately,” Langella says. “He looks at the world and says, ‘My God, look at what’s happening.’ ”
That may all add up to an eat-your-vegetables message not consonant with how most A-list studio movies are promoted. But even if the film portrays such arcane realms as the global banking system, it could seek its populist appeal through a simple, uplifting idea, one it toys with at the film’s conclusion: that even snakes can shed their skin.
“There’s no question the system is oppressive. [But] people need hope,” Stone says. “I don’t like cynical endings. I choose to believe Little Red Riding Hood doesn’t get eaten by the wolf.”
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