Wall Street

Movie Review: Wall Street

Year of Release: 1987
Country of Origin: USA
Director: Oliver Stone
Cast: Michael Douglas, Charlie Sheen, Daryl Hannah, Martin Sheen

Plot outline: A young stockbroker prospers on Wall Street under the tutelage of a greedy millionaire stockbroker (IMDb).

The movie certainly offers universal human truths about business dealings, yet it is also clearly a product of its time. Stylistically, Wall Street is very much a part of the late 1980s: tortoise-shell glasses, yellow power ties, big cell phones, slicked hair. It is a fast-paced, absorbing movie that makes complicated business dealings understandable to the uninformed, yet still intriguing. The screenplay is smart and lean, and Stone's direction is solid and confident without being overly flashy. His limited use of fast zooms, rapid edits, and canted camera angles foretell of the more extreme stylistic decisions that would come into play in his later movies like JFK (1991), Natural Born Killers (1994), and Any Given Sunday (1999), while his soft spot for family dynamics clearly portends the sentimentality of World Trade Center (2006). There is rarely a boring moment in Wall Street, and although its tone tends to get a bit didactic near the end, it never feels overly moralistic. Stone grounds his morality play in the day-to-day workings of everyday life, whether that be the hustle and bustle of Bud's trading company or meetings with his father at a smoke-filled pub in Queens. Stone gets the small moments just right, especially the scenes between Martin Sheen and Charlie Sheen as father and son, which play nicely into the larger whole. Wall Street is remembered mainly as a movie that exposed the ugly underbelly of the greed-is-good corporate world of the 1980s, but it is also very much a human story about a father and son finally coming to understand each other. Michael Douglas is at his best playing the oily Gordon Gekko (he won a well-deserved Best Actor Oscar). Charlie Sheen is similarly well cast as Bud Fox the stockbroker with blue collar roots who will do anything to make good. Particularly poignant are his scenes with real-life father Martin Sheen, who plays his dad, factory worker and proud union steward Carl Fox. Supporting cast is top notch with the exception of miscast Darryl Hannah who sticks out like a sore thumb as Bud's "trophy" girlfriend, courtesy of Gordon Gekko. John C. McGinley and Hal Holbrook are highlighted as Bud's fellow account executives. (A, GC)

My judgement: ***1/2 out of 4 stars