Systemic Malignancy: A Review of 'Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps'

Early in 2010, Paul Greengrass decided (or, perhaps, was compelled) to make a film about the war in Iraq. Green Zone showed the hunt for WMD, the strategic folly of disbanding the Iraqi army, and the impotence of those who were manipulated by warmongers. However, to do this, names were changed, Matt Damon was cast, and John Powell’s score was cranked up during exciting chase scenes. The effect was a damning dilution of whatever was being said in the first place, which was mostly accepted public knowledge beforehand, and the lingering unease that follows the brandishing of the weapons of the enemy by the liberal left (a moral hazard best left alone).

Following an identical model, Oliver Stone in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps depicts recent factual, cataclysmic, and widely reported historical events – the 2008 near-collapse of the global financial system, ground zero being, appropriately enough, Ground Zero. Like Greengrass, Stone upends much of the value of his project by re-aligning the facts to follow a Hollywood template, here a family drama. Shia LaBeouf’s Wall Street trader is our guide through the turmoil – but even he gives his mother $30,000 he “doesn’t have” to bail-out her failing real estate business, thus proving himself to be part of the problem in more ways than one. Indeed, Stone’s awareness of the circularity and repeatability of frailty and disaster is a rare strength in this sequel.

The other assets are put brilliantly on display in the first hour, as the naturally metaphor-oriented writer-director demonstrates more visual flair than he has in fifteen years. The titular neighbourhood glistens and gleams as invisible information shoots from one anonymous trading floor to another and an audience has a struggle keeping up. Only after the first act does it become clear that we weren’t really meant to – the meat of the story is a marriage crisis. He is a trader, she runs a lefty website; but her dad is Gordon Gekko, who has turned over a new leaf but still orders his life as a serious of predatory trades.

Gekko, played with jewelled menace by Michael Douglas, is again the star of the show, as he was in the 1987 Wall Street. He has been in jail for the entire 1990s, released in the wake of 9/11 (he then bides his time for seven years, presumably writing his book, before his stage-managed, Edmond Dantès-like return). This chronology, eliding as it does Bill Clinton’s presidency, as well as the period between the cold and on terror wars, is intriguing, as though Gekko’s such as these have no choice but to hibernate during Democratic administrations. But for all his correct predications (there’s no bigger aid to a screenwriter than hindsight), Gekko curiously lurks at the edge of events, a bystander to the systemic problems, rather than the marble-solid manifestation of them that he was in the 1980s. There is mileage in this interpretation, but not validity, certainly not with the ending Stone has in store.

The touting of the funding of fusion reactor research seems a knee-jerk move towards clean technologies, but the explanation of this reveals a paradox: intense energy is concentrated on a miniscule point, which then detonates, the immense outpouring offering more energy than was put in. Of a piece with the frequent talk throughout the film of unsustainable bubbles and systemic problems, this suggests that all optimism is deluded. A hint of this cynicism can be detected in the otherwise cloying final moments, but this vibe seems bolted on to a Hollywood template rather than ingrained in the logic of the tale being told. The tale is classical, mythical, and the entire point of myth is to reassert the continuing nature of things, the stability and order of the world. What Wall Street and Wall Street could do without is any more myth.

Like Green Zone, too much faith is placed in a radical alternative within the media. The stinging irony of this is the thudding conservatism with which both that film and Money Never Sleeps proffer their depiction of historical occurrences, changing details enough to not be libellous, and facts enough to not be accused of dullness. These are not allegations that can be levelled at The Social Network, but then that story had something of a (systemic) happy ending, and is a far more deserving companion piece to Oliver Stone’s 1980s icon in its laser-sharp revelation of the absurd institutional dynamics of the moment.

Gordon Gekko was a bracing creation in 1987, but he was ahead of the curve, the Wall Street meltdown which occurred shortly following the release being credited with much of the box office success and legendary status of Wall Street. This re-tread is hopelessly behind the times, like a two-year old Sunday supplement. However, with strong brand recognition and a vigorous marketing campaign, the film did manage to make back its $70 million budget. It’s not only banks that are too big to fail.

Easy Answers: A Review of 'Green Zone'

Our governments lied to us. For reasons of profit, vengeance, convenience, or a combination of all three, the administrations of the United States and the UK relied upon faulty intelligence in making the case for war in Iraq. So a million column inches have said in the days since. So, too, Paul Greengrass says, declaratively and to little effect, in his new film ‘Green Zone’.

There seems little room in popular culture for the war in Iraq to be anything other than a decisive act of will. The messy reality of what might actually have occurred in the months and years leading up to the invasion are polarised into black and white, right and wrong, democracy and dictatorship. Only ‘In The Loop’, Armando Iannucci’s brilliant satire based on his own BBC show ‘The Thick Of It’, managed to express any of the shades of grey, as civil servants and button-pushers who had little inkling or concern for what was truly happening around them were prodded, manipulated and coerced into making the case for war. (Although the televised coverage of the Chilcot inquiry comes close to matching this fudged, awkward depiction of events).

In ‘Green Zone’ this thronging confused mass becomes something much more recognisable: rather than the sexing up of doubtful intelligence, here we have outright fabrication, villainy and murder. An American military officer on the hunt for WMD begins to doubt the validity of his leads, in doing so discovering and being disgusted by the lies he has been fed. The story is told straight by director Greengrass, who originally cut his teeth on political documentary (and went on to make ‘The Bourne Supremacy’ and ‘The Bourne Ultimatum’) and who here uses a $140 million dollar movie as a vehicle for a howl of political dissatisfaction.

There is a fundamental illogic at the heart of the enterprise that makes it an impossible film to respect. Greengrass stated in an interview with The Guardian that he wanted to try to bring the Bourne audience along to this new picture, explicitly a cinematic rendering of a dossier he produced on events titled ‘How Did We Get It So Wrong?’. Yet anchoring the story to a traditional action-film narrative of goals (first a book of addresses, then a outlaw Ba’ath party politician) and cheap characterisation (manipulated journalist, antagonistic special forces commander, callous Neoconservative politician) makes his interpretation of events – valid as it may perhaps be – seem at best a fairy tale.

Further undermining credibility, much of Baghdad is recreated in helicopter shots using digital effects. These fail to create a compelling environment, and instead render the world of the characters Star Wars-esque: a backdrop to larger-than-life heroics and simple solutions to basic questions. Due to the certificate of the film there is little blood, and less swearing – when the hero gets to yell, “What the fuck are you doing?” his mouth is even obscured by an AK-47, making the line all the easier to dumb down for the US television broadcast. Complain all you like about the politics of Ridley Scott’s ‘Black Hawk Down’, but at least when he crashed a helicopter he did it for real; here, it’s all digital, and the crash itself is offscreen. This matters not so much because of the lack of efficiently delivered spectacle, but because of the indifference it demonstrates towards the lives of the third-tier characters, an acceptable offence in a big budget action flick, but a heinous crime in a picture about the dangers of political expediency and disregard for the lives of soldiers and civilians. The script judiciously attacks those accused of lying, or involved in peddling a lie, yet Greengrass’ filmmaking here is as heavy in rhetorical propaganda as the Bush administration ever was. We see the former president deliver part of his ‘Mission Accomplished’ speech and are supposed to scoff, but the film itself finishes off in the exact same absurdly triumphalist tone.

Supposedly based on ‘Imperial Life in the Emerald City’, Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s factual tour through post-invasion Iraq, the film ditches this material for the most part. ‘Emerald City’ revelled in the surreal experience of twenty-four year old city administrators lying poolside in the Saddam Hussein’s former imperial palace while half a mile away civilians were being killed in car bombs and water and electricity were luxuries in short supply. A little of that survives here, but only as window dressing: the most interesting scene of the film sees a soldier in full uniform walk entirely ignored through a crowded hotel lobby thronging with westerners holding bottled beer. This incongruity, as the mise-en-scene of war brushes up with recognisable everyday activities, is where Chandrasekaran’s account found all its strength, so it’s a shame that ‘Green Zone’ so studiously ignores it. Compare to ‘The Hurt Locker’, with its pirate DVD market, and the memorable scene in the American grocery store at the end; or ‘In The Valley of Elah’, and the denouement that reveals the twenty-first century psyche as incapable of distinguishing between combat and domesticity. Or, of course, ‘Generation Kill’, David Simon’s HBO miniseries, in which soldiers waiting to attack quote lines from ‘Heat’, and later edit together a video montage of their own experience of battle with Johnny Cash on the soundtrack. Watched in the light of such recent work, ‘Green Zone’ looks almost mould-breakingly naïve.

In the run-up to the last presidential election, Matt Damon criticised Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin for being ill-suited to the job, remarking on how the bringing of her folksy wisdom to the White House would be "Like something from a Disney film," and therefore ridiculous. Unfortunately, by taking the lead role in ‘Green Zone’, he is guilty of exactly what he there condemned, and which the film itself preaches against: the distortion of facts to make them fit a classical narrative which serves a specific agenda. Subsequently, the film succeeds neither as political statement nor as spectacular entertainment.