Screen:

...True, his populism has a chromosomal flaw, but the flaw is linked to his films' great virtue: they don't speak to the already converted...

...Stone understands male ambition-and views it with both sympathy and moral distance...

...As with Platoon, Stone wants viewers to think about complex moral issues- here, unethical methods of profitmaking...

...Contrast, for example, the image of the "good father" in Platoon (William Dafoe) with the dual vapidity of Holbrook and Martin Sheen...

...When his father inadvertently passes on inside information about the airline business, Bud grabs his chance...

...Darryl Hannah is satirized as a young artiste about town...

...Stone dedicates the film to his father, a stockbroker and a man who frequently complained to his son about the monotonous media caricatures of greedy tycoons...

...TOM O'BRIEN...

...There are also "good" businessmen (principally Hal Holbrook) and a loyal airline employee (Martin Sheen...

...As a result, he evokes performances from male actors-not only the older leads (Dafoe and Berenger in Platoon, Douglas here), but from supporting actors in "loser" positions (Kevin Dillon as a sadistic soldier in Platoon, here John G. McGinley as Marv, a young stockbroker...

...Stone the moralist is most powerful not when he lectures such men, but when he shows pity for what they put themselves through...

...Wall Street does portray one giant, demoniccase of corruption in the speculator Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas and modeled on Ivan Boesky, the Wall Street financier recently convicted of insider trading...

...Stone's shrewdness in this marketplace of ideas about the marketplace is enlivened by strong moral concern...

...Douglas is too powerful to allow a fair contest, and neither Holbrook nor Martin Sheen can hold a candle to his blithe dark spirit...

...Because," Douglas answers, with total aplomb, "it was wreckable...

...Stone shapes Wall Street to counteract the simplistic ideological views of both right and left about the business world...

...The comparison is not overstated...

...Douglas ("I create nothing, I own nothing") increases his wealth through paper manipulations (liquidations, takeovers, threats of takeover, etc...

...This sketchy treatment weakens dramatic focus...

...Douglas's wife (Sean Young) dithers over answering a doorbell and smiles adoringly during her husband's speechifying...

...And given the reality of the current Wall Street scene, where strong voices for the common good are rarely heard, models for characterization are not readily at hand...

...Stone understands such characters extremely well...

...But his is a strength that unbalances the film...

...He speaks their language-a sexist trait, perhaps, but one that allows him to be heard by a part of the population often deaf to moral address...

...McGinley gets some sprightly lines (the best, an early one about one investor's "ethical bypass at birth," a good foreshadowing of the theme...

...and the drama of good against evil is labored and uneven...

...There is none of the saccharin, trendy worship of materialism seen in 1987 films like The Secret of My Sucess and Baby Boom, or in television series like Dallas and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous...

...Good and evil angels fight for the soul of the genial but ambitious young stockbroker aptly named "Bud...

...Holbrook too often falls back on folksy, Mark Twainish gestures, and scenes between the two Sheens are completely lame...

...When the older Sheen mentions his $47,000 salary as an airline maintenance manager, the younger Sheen admonishes: "Dad, there's no noblity in poverty anymore...

...In Wall Street's best scenes we see stock manipulations in frenzies of buying and selling...

...many scenes end with apt translations of "Street" jargon into everyday terms...

...he has Bud's ambitions but not his brains and lacks any perspective on his own life of quiet, driven desperation...

...it is certainly one scene (and camera pan) too long...

...Like Satan in Paradise Lost, he gets all the good (bad) lines...

...But this is a defect linked to a great strength...

...The scene is shocking but powerful: it made me wonder about the last time in American life that some representative of the public good had spoken so commandingly (I thought of the long, eternal dourness of Common Cause's John Gardner, or the ever glum Ralph Nader...

...Good" is always difficult to make dramatically convincing...

...Douglas's satanic majesty has its best moment in a speech at a shareholders' meeting, an ode to private greed actually taken from a Boesky speech...

...Why did you wreck this company...

...SCREEN STONED ON GREED DOUGLAS & SHEEN ON WALL STREET Wall Street is mediocre by one standard, good by another...

...Charlie Sheen asks when even he is shocked by his Master's tactics...

...Compared to director/ writer Oliver Stone's previous films, Salvador and Platoon, it disappoints with hokeyness, uneven development, and some weak characterizations...

...But Stone has also made an error: In fragmenting the image of "the good father," so critical to his life and art, he is left with two halves that are less than the sum of their parts...

...But unlike most films about business, Wall Street is sharply observant...

...In the film's focus on the recent boom (pre-October 19), Stone seems a prophet on profit: when he started this project early in 1986, the current wave of insider scandals was barely in sight...

...In pursuing his dreams, Bud becomes a tool not only of Douglas but of the current vogue for making big money fast, the theme of the story...

...his moral power in treating their compulsions is that much greater because he knows them from the inside out-the way Tolstoy understood the rakes and rascals of Russia...

...rather than creating real wealth (products for use...

...The film's populist (but not anti-capitalist) moral is too pointed...

...Stone's promise as a filmmaker is in reaching real-life men with a realistic and fair view of themselves, one that they might understand, one that might even lead them to question their values...

...Bud wants to be a "player," one of the few that really matter on "the Street...

...Charlie Sheen, lead in Platoon, here plays the fictional son of his real father, Martin Sheen...

...Why is "good" so weak here...

...One index of Stone's complex mixture of strengths and flaws is his markedly different treatment of men and women...

...But the fact is that Stone just does do bad better...

...Unfortunately, his thinking does not always work out dramatically...

...But Marv is a loser...

...He seems not to have heard of business women on Wall Street or seen them chatting on Louis Rukeyser...

...I'll take this film, even if flawed...

...Nor do we see the trite stereotypes of corrupt businessmen...