Wall Street - 1987
I have to say, this was better for me the second time around. The film really hits its stride as it rounds into its third act, and our "fly on the wall" perspective sends the picture to higher levels. We may not always understand every single word of these backroom meetings, but we catch the whole gist. Once moral quandaries and hard decisions come to bear, Stone is in his wheelhouse.
That being said, I really wanted to drop this to 3.5 stars, due to the blandness of some of its performances. Charlie Sheen is almost a completely blank canvas. I'm sure this was simply to allow him to be this empty vessel into whom Douglas' silver-tongued (and haired), charismatic Gekko could spew his endless rapacity. But it makes our empathetic "buy in" when the film transitions into its reckoning phase a little more difficult to attain. Sean Young, Daryl Hannah, and Hal Holbrook are all, of course, adequate here in both their sketching and portrayals. Yet all have been far better elsewhere.
This leaves us with the incomparable work of Mr. Michael Douglas. Or, as I like to think of it, if Avarice Wore Suspenders. Douglas simply owns every scene in which he is present (and that is most of them). He's given some terrific monologues and dialogue to chew on, but he imbues so many with line readings which just stick to the brain. The example par excellence is indubitably the "Greed is good" address. But there are just as many tossed off one-liners which ring the bell just as well.
I suppose, in the end, a bit of all this felt dated to me. In the wake of films like Margin Call, The Big Short, and The Wolf of Wall Street, Wall Street's big lessons appear passe. Moneygrubbing stockbrokers are now a cliche, not a revelation, for instance. Regardless, it is important to recall that Oliver Stone and co. got there MUCH earlier, and in so doing, set the template for how these pictures would go in the decades ahead.
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