Gordon Goes Global

In 2007, when Dinesh D’Souza fingered Oliver Stone as a member of “the Hollywood Left,” it was only the latest in a half-century of conservative attacks on the pinko bias of the American film industry. That bias was once quite real, and if you want a lucid, fair-minded account of its history, read Ronald and Allis Radosh’s superb Red Star Over Hollywood.

Tweet

Email

Print

But for many years now, the dominant bias in Hollywood has not been leftism but gleeful amorality. Case in point: the big news at the Cannes Film Festival last week was the premier of Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, directed by Stone and touted as a timely update of Wall Street, the director’s 1987 film ostensibly attacking socially irresponsible corporate raiders.

I say “ostensibly” because the hero of that Wall Street was not the honest stockbroker played by Hal Holbrook, much less the bleeding-heart labor leader played Martin Sheen. It was the sleek, reptilian corporate raider played by Michael Douglas: Gordon Gekko. When that character uttered the immortal line, “Greed is good,” he seduced not only the shareholders in the movie but a generation of would-be Gekkos, not just in America but around the world.

Does Stone’s new film provide a corrective? Given all that’s happened since 1987 — the cupidity of Enron and Tyco, the duplicity of mortgage bankers and financial wizards, and the complicity of governments in all of it — one might expect him to rake the entire international ruling class over his red-hot, leftist coals.

But this new film does nothing of the kind. Rather than clarify the difference between right and wrong in the complex world of global finance, it simply repeats the Wall Street formula of reducing the good guys to platitudinous mush and making the bad guys irresistible — especially Gekko, played by Douglas as a silver-maned ex-con eager to get back into a game that, to his delight, is more vicious than ever.

Conservative critics take note: Oliver Stone is not a Hollywood leftist, or even the sort of good liberal who urges business school grads to take the newly minted “MBA Oath.” He’s an amoral egotist who identifies with the ruthless rich. There are more celebrity walk-ons in this new film than on the New York Times society page, among them Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, Charlie Sheen (who starred in the 1987 film), and Stone himself, preening his way through three different scenes.

The reviewer for the Daily Telegraph put it best: “How cosy it all looks. Who said the global recession couldn’t be fun?”