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At heart, Wall Street and Broadcast News are comedies too, with high energy levels to match their milieus and enough acid wit to recall the sophisticated screwball comedies of the '30s. Wall Street Director Oliver Stone and Co- Author Stanley Weiser (Project X) get their manic mileage from the gaudy argot of today's power brokers, principally one Gordon Gekko, a black knight who proclaims that "greed is good, greed is right, greed works, greed will save the U.S.A." Listen to the art of the boss raider as he works the phones to spear a couple mil in two minutes flat: "Wait for it to head south, then we'll raise the sperm count . . . If it looks as good as on paper, we're in the kill zone . . . Dilute the son of a bitch. I want every orifice in his body flowing red . . . Lunch!? Are you joking? Lunch is for wimps."
As played with reptilian brio by Michael Douglas, he has some of the pile- driving charm of Michael's actor father Kirk in his early gangster roles. As it happens, the lizardly Gekko is a potential father figure for sly Fox; the other is Bud's dad, a working-class hero who is a mechanic at the small airline that Gekko may soon devour. The elder Fox is played by Charlie Sheen's own dad Martin; and to complete the motif, Stone has dedicated Wall Street (as he did Salvador) to his stockbroker father, who died two years ago. The entire film is in fact a ferocious meditation on the dilemma of a son choosing his father. Which one will Bud emulate: the noble failure or the triumphant sleaze?
The outcome is never really in doubt, so streamlined and predictable are the characters. The women in Bud's life are there primarily as temptations. His broker and lawyer pals are either consciences or bad company. The film seems intended as a blend of morality play and classical satire -- Everyman meets Volpone. Stone always comes at you with big dreams and nightmares; he wants the first and last word on every subject he touches, whether Central America (Salvador), Viet Nam (Platoon) or Wall Street. This time he works up a salty sweat to end up nowhere, like a triathlete on a treadmill. But as long as he keeps his players in venal, perpetual motion, it is great scary fun to watch him work out.
Jim Brooks is a subtler creator than Oliver Stone -- 18 years of writing and producing nifty TV shows like Mary Tyler Moore, The Associates and Taxi taught him to coax comedy from character instead of tossing it grenade-like under the viewer's seat, and Tom Grunick is a far subtler creature of malice than Bud or Gekko. But Brooks is agitated about the state of network news. He is unsettled by the marriage of the comely face and the bottom line. He is disturbed by the new big boys on Media Avenue -- not just in the news, and not just in broadcasting -- who believe that ideas are digestible only in 15-second sound bites, that manners and life-styles are matters of life and death, that pictures tell stories better than words, that personalities sell the product known as infotainment. And if facts give way to factoids, if this month's celebrity gets confused with last month's, hey, that's show biz. Covering the toddler-trapped-in-a-well story this October, an NBC reporter clucked sympathetically about poor "little Jessica Hahn."