Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #205 Wall Street (1987)

Name a more iconic duo!

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.  

This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. I also recently began a series chronicling the films of bad boy auteur Oliver Stone. 

Since a kind, much appreciated patron has chosen to have me write about Oliver Stone’s complete filmography for this column I should probably find ways to enjoy him and his work or I am in for a long slog. 

Watching Stone’s zeitgeist chasing and capturing 1987 drama Wall Street I found myself thinking that the key to a project like this is appreciating the controversial auteur and his films for what they are rather than hating them for what they are not. 

That can be tough. I was ten years old when Platoon was released and eleven when Wall Street made “Greed is good” a ubiquitous catch-phrase so I grew up seeing Stone as a great filmmaker who made serious films of quality about life’s biggest, most profound subjects: life and death and war and greed and capitalism and the illusory promise of the American Dream.

nice office!

I grew up seeing Stone not just as a Great Artist but as an outsized caricature of a Great Artist. Then I got old enough to actually see Stone’s films for myself and realized that I had been sold a bill of goods. 

If adults had lied to me about Stone’s greatness was it possible that they had lied to me about other things as well? What if EVERYTHING I had been taught was as bogus as my early conception of Oliver Stone as a Great American Artist? 

Wall Street made me think I was looking at Stone backwards. What if he’s not a Great Artist but a Vulgar Entertainer with real panache, a Reagan-era Clifford Odets hopped up on stimulants, pretension and self-love selling melodramatic morality tales about America and Life and Society?

Wall Street is Stone’s The Sweet Smell of Success, a capitalist fever dream of endless upward mobility with Michael Douglas in the Burt Lancaster role of a figure of larger-than-life, Shakespearean evil who represents the evils of capitalism in its purest form, a Falstaff leading lost, ambitious young men astray and into his web of lies, selfishness and deceit.

Charlie Sheen stars as Buddy Fox, an ambitious young stockbroker in 1985 New York with a single goal in life: to attract the attention and favor of notorious, Michael Milliken-like corporate raider Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas, in an Academy Award winning performance of great quality and quantity). 

To that end he courts the older man shamelessly with gifts of Cuban cigars and flattering words about how he is an “incredible genius” as opposed to a shabby, sub-par genius. 

The titan of industry is flattered by the handsome young shark’s child-like hero worship but what really endears him to the soulless, iconically evil villain is his willingness to share potentially lucrative information about the airline his salt-of-the-earth union leader dad Carl (Martin Sheen) works for. 

Buddy isn’t just susceptible to seduction from his hero and role model: he’s eager to be seduced. He angrily insists that his malevolent mentor in the ways of EVIL introduce him to a shimmering, glittering paradise of cocaine, beautiful women, vast wealth and robot butlers that will cost him what little is left of his soul. 

It isn’t long until the ambitious young man is living the high life of a Reagan-era big shot, complete with a ridiculously expensive penthouse bachelor pad, expensive interior designer girlfriend (Darryl Hannah) who the film sees as a sleek, expensive luxury item rather than as a human being and an obscenely high-paying, if legally questionable job sleazing around on behalf of the world’s most openly evil businessman. 

Then, in a shocking, unprecedented development, Buddy learns the hard way that a Falstaffian mentor/tempter whose defining characteristic is that he will destroy everyone he comes into contact with, just for sport, is not, in fact, a trustworthy figure. 

When I got the big assignment to write up all of Oliver Stone’s movies I was grateful for the work and the income but I was, truth be told, not terribly excited about having to watch all of Stone’s movies. 

I’m much more excited about the prospect of watching movies shot by legendary cinematographer Robert Richardson, who worked with Stone on Salvador, Platoon, Talk Radio, Born on the Fourth of July, The Doors, JFK, Heaven & Earth, Natural Born Killers, Nixon and U-Turn. 

Richardson’s masterful work here makes New York in the 1980s look like a yuppie wonderland where everything is beautiful and expensive and so sleek that it positively gleams. Wall Street is a film of dazzling surfaces with next to nothing underneath, a morality tale that is ham-fisted, didactic and obvious in that inimitable Oliver Stone fashion. 

Stone just barely dramatizes that Buddy is so morally compromised that he doesn’t know who he is anymore by having him gaze out at the Manhattan skyline and earnestly inquire, “Who am I?”

As with Platoon, Stone can’t help but put the movie’s already achingly simple message in a character’s mouth when (SPOILER) he has Martin Sheen’s exemplar of blue-collar earthy integrity say of his wayward son’s upcoming jail sentence for insider trading, “That’s the price, son. It’s gonna be hard on you, that’s for sure. But maybe in some kind of screwed up way, it’s the best thing that could have happened to you. You stop going for the easy buck and produce something with your life. Create something instead of living off the buying and selling of others.” 

Buddy discovers that, contrary to the film’s famous catchphrase, greed is not, in fact, good but rather a great evil with the potential to destroy entire societies 

Getting fucked over by his ostensible mentor and teacher repeatedly is seemingly the only thing that can keep him from becoming Gordon Gekko. 

As with Odets at his biggest, there’s nothing naturalistic or understated about Stone and co-screenwriter Stanley Weiser’s slangy, purple, jargon and testosterone-heavy dialogue or the big strokes of Wall Street’s storytelling. 

Wall Street is not subtle or understated but it is wildly entertaining thanks to Richardson’s gorgeous cinematography, Stewart Copeland’s raucous percussive score, which captures the coked-up rhythms of 1980s Manhattan on a bold sonic level and a spectacular cast that combines perfectly cast leads with a murderer’s row of great character actors, including John C. McGinley, Terence Stamp, Hal Holbrook as a folksy gentleman stockbroker surrounded by sharks and piranhas, James Karen, James Spader, Saul Rubinek, Sylvia Miles, Paul Guilfoyle, Josh Mostel and Millie Perkins. 

It’s very easy to believe that the man who wrote legendary bloodbaths like Scarface and Conan the Barbarian also wrote and directed Platoon and Wall Street, since they’re every bit as vulgar, macho and over-the-top, if slightly more respectable.

Check out that cool combover! You’d NEVER know he was losing his hair!

Coursing through the cocaine-laced veins of Gordon Gekko are the charismatic heavies Michael Douglas’ dad played so brilliantly in masterpieces like The Bad and the Beautiful and Ace In the Hole. 

Gordon Gekko may be a figure of cartoonish evil but he owns his greed and selfishness in a way that renders them almost admirable. He may be many things, almost all of them overwhelmingly bad, but he’s not a hypocrite. That counts for an awful lot in this world. 

Wall Street is only slightly more restrained and grounded a morality tale than The Devil’s Advocate, where the wealthy bad guy is LITERALLY THE ANTI-CHRIST. Wall Street reminded me of The Devil’s Advocate in many other ways as well, despite Wall Street being an Oscar-winning film of distinction and importance and The Devil’s Advocate rightly being seen as a goofy, irresistible guilty pleasure. 

Wall Street is a goofy, irresistible guilty pleasure in my book as well. It’s great fun but it’s not exactly high art, even if many of the principals were undoubtedly high off their ass while the movie was being made. It was the 1980s, after all, and no movie, in Stone’s filmography or outside of it, is more 1980s than Wall Street.

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