wall street: money never sleeps

For the first hour and a half of Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, I thought I had found my favorite movie of the year. Timely, intelligent, well-acted, stylish; best of all, it had heart. Regardless of your stance on fiscal policy—left or right, Keynesian or classical—this film had a message that could resonate.

That was for the first hour and half.

It all fell apart after that. Like so many other films this year, Wall Street 2 is ultimately undone by a poor, tacked-on ending. A strong pro-family message still filters through, and the film is still worth seeing for its relevance, but its moral compass goes completely haywire by the end, destroyed by a plot twist that occurs in the last ten minutes.

Director Oliver Stone spends the entire film telling us that money can't buy happiness—relationships matter more than fickle, faithless material wealth. Wall Street is ruthless; greed can destroy lives. Winnie Gekko (Carey Mulligan) knows this all too well; her father Gordon Gekko went to prison for years for insider trading (the primary plot of the original film, which I have not seen) and she has been dealing with the havoc that wreaked on her family ever since. Her boyfriend Jake (Shia LaBeouf) is an up-and-coming proprietary trader who becomes deeply embroiled in the dog-eat-dog world of Wall Street. It takes a drastic toll on their fragile relationship, especially when Winnie finds out that Jake has been seeking advice from his entirely untrustworthy future father-in-law.

Winnie believes that Gordon isn't the ultimately-goodhearted, remorseful father figure that he seems to be. (Spoilers) As it turns out, she's right. Gordon cheats Jake and Winnie out of a huge sum of money and skips off to England to start a new business venture, leaving Jake and Winnie's relationship in shambles.

Stone then would have us believe that Gordon has a complete change of heart when he looks at ultrasound images of his unborn grandson; he returns home to his daughter and even pays back the money he stole from her. A happy ending, right?

The problem is that Gordon's change of heart doesn't mean anything. It would have meant something, maybe, if he hadn't taken the money in the first place, if he had seen the error of his ways and been content to live with his daughter and his new son-in-law and their child in a (relatively) modest fashion. (By "relatively modest" I mean that Winnie had $100 million in a Swiss bank account—pocket change compared to the kind of money the characters in this film deal with on a day-to-day basis, but still). Instead, Gordon only comes back once he's amassed another fortune. He buys his way back into his daughter's life with a pittance of the money he's made on her account, and it is this action that brings them together as a real family.

Money can't buy happiness, this film says—unless you're Gordon Gekko, and then you can solve all your relationship woes by writing a check.

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is a major disappointment, mostly because all of its great potential is wasted by a completely unnecessary plot twist that occurs ten minutes before the credits roll. It's recommendable for its timeliness, its fine performances and its lack of any major objectionable material, but any meaningful message it could have conveyed is ruined by that idiotic ending.