An Unhappy Past Oscar-Winner

Yikes: Shia LaBeouf is surprisingly, perhaps admirably, frank about revealing what a deep emotional crisis his co-star Michael Douglas from next month’s Wall Street sequel, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, is going through.  Douglas won an Oscar in 1987 for playing ruthless trader Gordon Gekko and now returns to the role — with Oliver Stone directing again and depicting Gekko warning about the current financial crisis after he gets out of a long prison stint, reformed.

Ironically, though, Douglas’s real-life son is now in prison, and it sounds like that matters to him a lot more than his movie work, which is to his credit, really.  I was already tempted — half out of a sense of duty, half out of perverse curiosity — to see the film just to discern what fresh anti-capitalist propaganda America’s favorite Chavez-lionizing director is foisting on us.  Now it may become one of those things like Martin Sheen’s performance in Apocalypse Now or Heath Ledger’s in The Dark Knight that we all have to see just to watch the cracks forming.

I suspect the film will not emphasize the fact that the homogeneity bred by regulation contributes to the potential for broad, systemic collapses instead of isolated ones — but that idea is explained at some length in last year’s special issue of Critical Review on “Causes of the Financial Crisis,” soon to be reprinted as a book, so pick that up as a supplement to the film.