Director is premiering a sequel to his 1987 hit ‘Wall Street,’ and the timing couldn’t be better

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CANNES, France — Addressing reporters at the Cannes Film Festival on Saturday, filmmaker Oliver Stone was rattling off a series of facts and figures about the contemporary
banking industry when he almost seemed to catch himself in his own
wonkishess.

“It’s gigantic subject matter, but it’s documentary subject matter,” Stone said about some of the themes running through “Wall Street:
Money Never Sleeps,” the follow-up to his era-defining hit that uses
the recent financial meltdown as a backdrop for his conflicted
characters. “You have to find that balance between the story of these
people and the economics of the collapse.”

With a screenplay by Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff, “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” which premiered this past weekend in Cannes
to mixed but mostly favorable reviews, is perhaps the most anomalous
star-driven movie to be released in years. On one level, it’s a studio
sequel featuring both built-in brand recognition and actors who can
lure filmgoers 30 and younger.

But the Fox film is also a serious movie about heady
topics — the perils of greed, the intersection of money and family and
even coneheaded subjects such as government bailouts and credit-default
swaps. If a CNBC producer tried to write a Greek tragedy, it would look
something like this film.

“The studios don’t make many movies like this,” says star Michael Douglas, speaking of a project that had been developed for years but was jump-started by the 2008 financial crash.

But this paradox raises a key question: Can a film at once serve as a policy document and commercial entertainment?

Released in 1987 and set in the era of go-go trading and corporate raiding, the original “Wall Street” told of a brash young trader named Bud Cox (Charlie Sheen), unctuous kingpin Gordon Gekko (Douglas, who won a best-actor Oscar) and the scheming that culminates
in Cox doing the right thing and Gekko being sent to jail for his sins.
Gekko’s trademark line, “Greed is good,” was intended as a sly comment
on the excesses of the era, although to many, the phrase, as well as
the movie itself, was taken as a glamorization of that world.

The new film starts with Gekko’s 2001 release from
jail, before flashing forward seven years to an elaborate plot
involving a young trader named Jacob Moore (Shia LaBeouf). Moore has (some) scruples but is rising in a world that just happens to be collapsing as investment banks run by Louis Zabel and Bretton James (Frank Langella and Josh Brolin) teeter under the weight of the 2008 financial crisis.

The story increasingly weaves in Gekko — who also happens to be the father of Moore’s fiancee (Carey Mulligan) — and who may be seeking either redemption or something more ominous.

In being given the chance to make a sequel, Stone
has been granted a kind of filmmaking mulligan — a chance to update a
movie that might otherwise seem dated in today’s ever-more-treacherous
financial world.

As both he and Douglas note, much of the traders’
criminal activity from the first film is now quasi-legal. Stone, who
like the others was speaking from a balcony overlooking the French Riviera at the uber-elegant Hotel du Cap — the very place that Gordon Gekko himself might vacation — explained the impetus for the new film as: “I
showed the madness of the free-market experiment in 1987, but I think
now we reached the end of that experiment.”

At the same time, the movie — for what its
principals say are reasons of accuracy as well as audience sympathy —
can’t go too far in turning the Wall Street moguls into monsters.

“It’s really easy to just look at the big picture and say, ‘Oh, wow, there are people not eating and Lloyd Blankfein is getting a $100-million bonus?'” LaBeouf says. “And then you meet a man like George Soros and your opinion changes. You meet a (Warren) Buffett or a (Paul) Volcker, and you see these are good men who have scruples, who are disciplined, who think there’s more to it than just a dollar. “

Originally scheduled for an April release — it would
have coincided almost exactly with news of the government’s fraud
lawsuit against Goldman Sachs — “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” will now hit theaters Sept. 24, a shift designed to allow the movie a splashy premiere in Cannes.
But Stone and Douglas say they believe there will be plenty in the
upcoming news to fuel interest in the film even in the fall.

The balance between the news and fictional drama can be a delicate one, and few understand that better than Stone.

At 63, newly married and with young children, the
famously hard-nosed director is said by many of his stars to have
mellowed, even as both his interviews and his films (he also is set to
release “South of the Border,” about South American leaders) suggest a
man still tangling with all manner of political and social topics.
During an interview, he moves between disbelieving jibes about the
hypocrisies of the business sector and the intricacies of the U.S.
electoral system.

That may all add up to an eat-your-vegetables
message not consonant with how most A-list studio movies are promoted.
But the film toys with a simple, uplifting idea at the film’s
conclusion: that even snakes can shed their skin.

“There’s no question the system is oppressive. (But)
people need hope,” Stone says. “I don’t like cynical endings. I choose
to believe Little Red Riding Hood doesn’t get eaten by the wolf.”

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