Topical or what? Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps opened one day after the rogue trader, Jerome Kerviel, was jailed for three years and ordered to pay €4,9-billion in damages for almost bringing down Société Générale.
But about 20 minutes into Oliver Stone’s laboriously self-important drama, I realised I’d stopped caring what Shia LaBeouf and Michael Douglas were up to, mainly because I was distracted by their swanky apartments with panoramic views of Manhattan. Gee, I thought, why don’t I live in an apartment like that?
And then I remembered — oh, yes, it’s because whenever I hear the words “insider trading”, “subprime” or “hedge fund”, my eyes glaze over and I start thinking about hats, or miniature dachshunds.
And that’s the problem with money in the movies. Each time you look forward to being privy to the inner workings of the global roulette that is sending all our lives into a tailspin, the system pulls off a dazzling feat of prestidigitation and — shazzam! — you start admiring Carey Mulligan’s earrings instead.
Money can’t be that hard to understand — some of the dimmest people I’ve ever met have been accountants or merchant bankers — but I suppose it’s not surprising that cinema colludes in the great game of economic smoke and mirrors, considering that the budget of your average Hollywood blockbuster could probably bankroll a small country.
Alan J Pakula probably had the right idea with Rollover, a 1981 conspiracy thriller in the same vein as his The Parallax View, and ending in scenes of social disorder one fears will soon be played out for real.
Perhaps the subject is simply too vast to be encompassed by a single movie, when what we need is the banking equivalent of The Wire, with money taking the place of drugs as a key element in the panoramic vision.
Or perhaps, as economic meltdown is vying with ecological catastrophe as the trigger for the end of civilisation as we know it, the most logical genre to depict the world of banking is the disaster movie.
What we need is the fiscal equivalent of The Day after Tomorrow. —