oliver stone '85-'05 marathon - film 3 (previous: platoon <- ->next: born on the fourth of july) stone was one of the first directors i started following, as he was making dynamic, impactful films right when i was old enough to start picking films apart and not just escaping into them. i'm well familiar with his major films, so for this revisit, i'm watching docs or listening to commentary on the films i already know very well. the dvd for wall street came with one called, prophetically, "money never sleeps". michael douglas looms large over this film as "gordon gecko", the epitome of a merciless, entitled, rich white guy '80s villain. it's sometimes easy to look at these movie characters and call them "stock" or "tropey" if you only know all the films that came after and imitated them, or if you don't know enough about real life to know this isn't a character. douglas just played what he saw when he shadowed wall street traders in the pre-production lead up to the film, the same as charlie sheen did. of course, for the movie the drama is dialed up and condensed and they play the most dramatic versions of those people, but they're still just art imitating life. if you've seen the documentary "enron: the smartest guys in the room" (and if you haven't, stop and go do that right now), you know that the "greed is good" mentality on display here is just scratching the surface of a huge ecosystem filled with morally bankrupt social climbers. douglas says in the documentary that even at that time (in 2000), he was getting finance bros coming up to him saying "gordon gecko was the man! you're the reason i got into trading!" as the villain of this film, a segment of america idolized him and wanted to be just like him. and that's how you get goldman sachs and lehman brothers and the great recession everyone: the people watching this movie and taking away the exact wrong message. to be clear, the right message, as much of the cast points out here, is an echo of platoon, but back at home. sheen again plays a young man who's tempted by the quicker, easier, more merciless path. two older men are warring for his soul, his two fathers if you will. literally, here. as iconic as douglas' scenes are with sheen, he's really not in the film that much more than sheen's own father, martin, playing a working class guy whose son goes into finance because "there's no nobility in poverty anymore." the scenes between the sheens are loaded with subtext and rich for meta-analysis, especially knowing what we know now. in the documentary, charlie talks about how he was having trouble summoning the emotion for his breakdown scene. he pulled out a letter that he kept with him from martin, railing at him for his many life mistakes and poor choices (already in '86!) and went method. he read the letter over and over until he was on the brink, then told oliver to roll camera. stone gets some of the finest performances from all his actors, especially charlie sheen, that they give in their careers. many of them talk about how hard he pushes, how much he antagonizes them to make them prove to him that they've got the role backwards and forwards. douglas talks about it here, about how the speeches stone wrote were so long and wordy that he needed a dialogue coach to work with him on breath control just so that he could get through them. martin sheen talks about trying to ad lib a bit and change lines he didn't like only to have stone repeatedly haul him up and tell him to stay on script. daryl hannah is not interviewed for the film, but everyone else talks about how she obviously was struggling with the role and had some objections...it's a relatively thankless part, hard to identify with (i assume) for someone of her character. stone talks about how he would've gladly switched her role with sean young's and she would've killed it, except young and charlie were at each other's throats on set. james spader doesn't even get a mention, and you know you've got a stacked cast when that's the case! one thing the behind-the-scenes doc is great at is going into how stone uses camera movement and makes filming choices. this is something sometimes hard to see in a theatrical cut. you can notice cinematography or even editing sometimes, but the camera choices are somewhat more subtle. douglas talks about scenes where stone just pulled a seat out of a car, stuck his cameraman there, and did the whole scene with the lens right in the actors' faces. hard for them to focus, but great to communicate proximity and intensity to the audience. martin sheen talks about filming coverage with a single camera panning back and forth rather than using cuts. stone gives the scene dynamic movement and a bit of disorientation that's fitting for an argument, but in practical terms, it means the actors have to pause after delivering lines...something the audience doesn't register unless it's done wrong. stone himself talks little about his guerilla filmmaking here, extended from his previous two features, but focuses more on his script and the ideas he was trying to communicate. he views this film as an extension of his script for scarface, and you can almost imagine gordon gecko continuing after this film, one mountain of coke away from going ballistic on any army that might come through his door. it's all just 'business at any cost', the american dream run amok. wall street is an argument against unfettered capitalism, a plea for government of the people to be for the people. gecko himself says in the film "you're not naive enough to still think we live in a democracy, are you??" the uber-rich have no rules, not then and certainly not in a post-pandemic world where we went from 1 person worth $100 billion to ten people in just the last year. stone's films have always been about our propensity to turn a blind eye to the dehumanizing of our world. i think we used to view this one as a snapshot of the '80s, but it turns out it was just portraying how that whole aspect of our world works, still today. this movie is sadly more relevant than ever.