Charles Ferguson’s ‘Inside Job’ and Oliver Stone’s ‘Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps’ were screened on two consecutive days at the recently concluded Haifa International Film Festival, and the two would make for a good double feature. Both deal with the on-going financial crisis- Ferguson in his methodical and exhaustive documentary approach, Stone in his ideological and angry dramatic bludgeoning.
Ferguson’s film is made in the mold of ‘No End In Sight’, his 2007 film examining America’s presence in Iraq. Both films feature a vast assortment of interviews and documents that educate the audience as to just how hopeless things are. With the guiding voice of narrator Matt Damon, Ferguson charts the course of the crisis from its beginning – in the financial deregulation of the Reagan administration – through all the steps that allowed it to gain such magnitude, the cascading revelations with the collapse of the housing bubble, all the way to where that leaves us now, in 2010. It shows a cornucopia of corruption, greed and callousness, a grand mosaic of how utterly invisible 99% of the world is to the ruling 1%.
The moral vacuum is so profound that describing situations depicted in this film as “evil” sounds so last century. Ferguson tries to burst the inhuman bubble of these financial institutions, but comes off as positively churlish to bring up points like ‘isn’t it wrong for a company to make money off its shareholders losses?’ (losses the company purposely instigated, no less). The people and events shown here are depressing, but even more depressing is the inescapable feeling of one’s insignificance, be it fiscal, intellectual or moral. Indeed, the film itself supports the notion that we the consumers aren’t that much better than the guys on top.
One of the sub-textual themes of the film is how much the housing and credit bubble is the fault of the irresponsible people who couldn’t help themselves, borrowing beyond their means. They’re greedy, we’re morons, and the only hope we might have is to get rid of all the people still in power who caused this mess, which is not very likely. I’m not saying Ferguson is in any way misrepresenting things- but this illuminating, effective and very good film is also a profoundly hopeless one. ‘Inside Job’ is the feel-bad film of the year.
The cumbersomely titled ‘Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps’ lies at the other end of the spectrum. It is a callow, mostly soft film that wraps things up in an unbelievably neat and comfy manner. It’s a shame, because the film starts out well, and has some terrific stuff in it. After a re-introduction to the immortal Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), we are guided through this film by Jake Moore (Shia LeBoeuf), a rising young broker who is in a relationship with Gekko’s estranged Wall-Street hating liberal journalist daughter Winnie (‘An Education’s Carrie Mulligan).
LeBoeuf works for Frank Langella, who plays the founder and managing director of an investment house that is based on Bear Stearns. Like reality, the floundering of this company in early 2008 begins the chain-reaction of bank failures and bail-out and all-out catastrophic financial disaster. The most compellingly written and staged scenes of this film deal with the inner workings of the financial establishments in those dire months, where selfish interests and old grudges allowed this first firm to fail, while pulling together to get the government to bail out the monolithic banks that were ‘too big to fail’ -personified in this film by Churchill Schwartz, Stone’s stand in for Goldman Sachs and Morgan Chase. This monolith’s CEO (Josh Brolin, Stone’s ‘W.’) is the primary villain of the film, and his end in the film speaks volumes as to the difference between Stone’s outlook and Ferguson’s.
Always an interesting director, Stone’s past reputation as a polemical firebrand has been softened in recent years, with softer, more human, less political films like ‘World Trade Center’ and ‘W.’. ‘Wall Street: MNS’ continues the trend, and dilutes the expected fire and brimstone approach to the “Greed is good” Wall Street philosophy by making the film a character driven film. The film’s major theme is the concept of ‘Moral Hazard’ -that helping out someone who through his own irresponsibility, is left in dire need, would only encourage him to continue on the same path. Stone mixes this concept with the concept of revenge -the driving force for both LeBoeuf’s character (who wants to get back at Brolin for precipitating the implosion of Langella and his company) and, of course, for Gordon Gekko.
Douglas plays Gekko as a wolf in wolves clothing, but one that we really want to believe is a sheep. Douglas steps back into Gekko as if he’s been playing him regularly over the past 23 years -everything we remember is still there. He’s great fun to watch. The cast is uniformly good, particularly Langella – he imbues the opening section of the film with a weight sorely lacking in the entirely predictable web of relationships going on in this film. That predictable plotting, driven into the audience with an incredibly tone-deaf closing scene really keeps this film from putting real weight behind its notions of revenge, moral hazard, and greed. If everything happens exactly like it does in every other movie, what do all the highfalutin’ ideas add up to? In the end, we are left with a single villain – Brolin – who is punished for his crimes. The LeBoeuf character is compromised, but learns a lesson and is taken back by his idealistic girlfriend. The system is blamed inasmuch as it is personified by Gordon Gekko…but even he gets a soft send-off. For an angry filmmaker, Stone is sure painting a boring, rosy portrait here. Unlike its driving character, ‘Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps’ is only pretending to be a wolf, when inside, it’s all sheep.
SHLOMO PORATH
