(2010) We want to be told a bedtime story, a fairytale about fame and fortune for ourselves, which makes each of us participants in a systemic insanity. Unfortunately, only the opulently wealthy (whether idealists, capitalists, or realists) can afford to be luxuriously optimistic about the future. "Bulls make money. Bears make money. Pigs? They get slaughtered."

Having served nearly eight years in prison, in 2001 Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) finds no one waiting for him outside the gates of the Sing Sing correctional institution upon his release; seven years later his daughter Winnie (Carey Mulligan), reneging on an earlier agreement, still hates him for what happened during the interim to her mother and brother Rudy (died of drug overdose), for what he represented along with all of Wall Street. She blogs on an anti-Wall Street website called The Frozen Patch.

Nevertheless, Winnie's live-in boyfriend Jacob Moore (Shia LaBeouf) works on Wall Street as a broker (using green to get green) for Keller Zabel Investments (KZI), specializing in alternative-energy companies, particularly a new firm experimenting with nuclear fusion.

In this very fine dramatic sequel to his 1987 movie Wall Street, director Oliver Stone (from screenplay by Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff with original music by Craig Armstrong and songs from Brian Eno and Bryan Ferry) focuses on the personal relationships between his characters with the financial bubbles, market meltdowns, creative destruction, and near collapse of the international banking system along with the attendant federal government's bailout of the "too-big-to-fail" banks as sensational backdrop.

With a bonus check for $1.45 million in hand from his boss and financial-father figure Louis Zabel (Frank Langella), Jake buys a diamond engagement ring, places a million-dollar bet at an inopportune time with his buddy Robby, and then gambles with Gordon - whom he initially sees in a lecture hall, along with an audience of people mostly without an income, a job, or assets, expounding on the market's sudden downturn without anyone's apparently being responsible, though everyone was culpable, shilling a new book, Is Greed Good? - at getting dad and daughter back together while scheming revenge against Churchill Schwartz's chief corporate raider Bretton James (James Brolin), who single-handedly devised a devastating takeover of KZI.

Emphasizing to Jake that in prison he learned that time (a depreciating asset) is far more valuable than money ("a bitch that never sleeps") to him now, Gordon tells his future son-in-law about Winnie's having $100 million in a Swiss bank account by way of suggesting a plot for doing good behind Winnie's back as well as getting back at their shared nemesis. At a dinner party Gordon says to his former raiding partner Bretton: "Stop telling lies about me, and I'll stop telling the truth about you."

Susan Sarandon plays the part of Jake's mother, a real-estate broker; Eli Wallach has the role of Jules Steinhardt, Churchill Schwartz's elderly sage; and uncredited Charlie Sheen once again makes a brief appearance as Bud Fox ("So, does Blue Horseshoe still love Anacott Steel?").

Upon his being discharged from prison, the old-fashioned, mid-'80s mobile phone (raising laughs in the theater audience) Gordon receives among other items from his belongings taken away when he was originally incarcerated isn't accurate since Gordon didn't go to prison until 1993 after a lengthy series of court battles.

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Copyright © 2010 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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