Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

I find rich, rich irony in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps‘s premiere at Cannes. First off, director Oliver Stone is in didactic mode throughout the film (at times it feels like a PowerPoint presentation) and in the film, and in his comments afterward, excoriates capitalism and greed, during a festival where everyone is trying to figure out how to secure financing to make movies and the main participants of the film are staying in swanky hotels and driving around in limos.

Stone appears to be trying to make amends for creating Gordon Gecko, an iconic Wall Street hero, since it was someone whose motives and mind-set the writer/director so clearly loathed. He’s now made Godzilla nice and turned Gecko (who has been played by Michael Douglas both times) from a confirmed capitalist into a redeemed reflector, exemplified by the twist on the iconic “Greed is good” line from the first film that features so prominently in the trailer for this one: “Someone reminded me I once said, ‘Greed is good,’ now it seems it’s legal.” Gecko delivers that line in a lecture he’s giving, which includes Jacob Moore (Shia LaBeouf) and Jacob’s fellow traders in the audience. What’s odd is that not only is the entire crowd lapping up what is essentially an upbraiding of corporate and personal avarice, but Jacob and his cohorts are rapturously enjoying it too. Don’t they hear what he’s saying? He’s reproaching them! But Stone, never a subtle storyteller, doesn’t let that bother him because, even though he makes Gecko appear to be as predatory as he was in the first film, you know he is pulling his punches and you know where this new film is going.

There are other things wrong with Money. Stone’s direction hasn’t felt this awkwardly intrusive since Natural Born Killers. In one scene, a phone call to Jacob  has the caller’s face (an attractive broker he’s working with) replace the face of the young woman sitting next to him, Winnie Gecko (Carey Mulligan). Yes, her name really is Winnie Gecko and yes, she’s Gordon’s  estranged daughter. Winnie is an activist who doesn’t seem to have as many issues with her name (if there ever was a justified reason to legally change a name, this is it) as with her dad, who went to the slammer for eight years for the events that Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) set in motion years before.

In another scene, when Jacob is in a discussion with Bretton James (Josh Brolin), and the audience realizes what Bretton must be bringing to Jacob’s mind is the memory of his mentor, Lewis Zabel (played by Frank Langella), Langella’s spectral image appears. James, by the way, is Stone’s new villain for the film, the heartless speculator who produces nothing but plunders everything.

The music by David Byrne, fine in its own right, is all wrong for this movie. It’s as if someone in the dubbing process was listening to Byrne and it accidentally was layered over the film

Though this film was an overall disappointment there are some nice lines and a few nice moments, typically when Stone is trying to fool you into believing that Gecko is as predatory, self-consumed, and honest as he was in the first movie.

There’s always one film a festival that is so fascinating and over-the-top that it demands your attention; you can’t turn away. This year that film is The Housemaid, a Korean film from director Im Sang-Soo. It stars Jeon Do-Youn (Best Actress at Cannes in 2007 for Milyang), Lee Jung Jae, Youn Yuh-Jong and Seo Woo. The leads are attractive and the scenes are erotic. It’s a very well made film, Im Sang-Soo aping De Palma, aping Hitchcock, and I suppose it is rich with dark, humorous analogies of class-ism in a patrician society. But really, the movie is what Variety used to call a “meller,” a melodrama that Douglas Sirk would have beemed about.

Jeon Do Youn (a truly winning actress) plays Eun-yi, an outwardly shy young woman who becomes a maid in the house of Hoon (Jung-Jae Lee). He is wealthy and powerful and has a beautiful young wife Hae Ra (Seo Woo), who is very pregnant with twins. Hoon immediately comes on to Eun-yi and she reciprocates readily and willingly in some pretty steamy scenes. They aren’t too quiet either so the affair becomes known to the Mrs. Danvers-ish Byung-sik (Youn Yuh-Jung). She spills the beans to Hae Ra’s mother, Mi-hee (Park Ji-young) and we’re off to the races. A “what’s going to happen next”curiosity takes over the proceedings and any semblance of importance, of social messaging, becomes subsumed by the nasty messiness of it all.

But it’s a glorious mess.