Oliver Stone
Wall Street

The finger slides among hundreds of DVDs neatly stacked in alphabetical order, but while trying to choose one, I fully realize that, in five minutes, I'll already be bored and find myself at the bar next door without any round plastic disc to put in the home player. So I flip through the newspaper and come across an article talking about the theoretical financial reform passionately promoted by President Obama in response to the 2008 crisis.

The story narrates the deeds of a small fish (Bud Fox), but highly ambitious, who yearns to see a large fin grow on his back ready to slice through the financial markets and prominently display rows of sharp teeth between his jaws. He is young and clean-shaven, but already tired of being a simple broker, spending life on the phone to receive and execute orders from clients who don't matter. He can't cope with the constant stress and the frantic, claustrophobic pace of an expanding New York where one must elbow and kick to make room. He looks at his older colleagues who, after years, struggle and fall in front of innovative software: the desire to emerge grows in him. He meets, by chance/persistence, Gordon Gekko: a legend who completely embodies the model of the self-made man whose only imperative is to earn a lot and quickly through the buy-sell game based on inside information torn without holds barred from his collaborators. If a handsome profit can be had, if it's "doable," a company can be bought and destroyed in a day. It matters little if this may mean bankrupting thousands of people. Thus Machiavelli looms large: how one attains glory is entirely secondary. "One must be smart enough not to fall into the oldest of myths: love and feelings in general. Fantasies created by people to keep themselves from jumping out the window."

Stone's film is a fierce critique of the dominating financial world of the '80s, completely devoid of morality and scruples, photographed through the characterization of characters played by a quality cast in which an over-the-top Douglas roars and rises. The set design is relevant, with almost all scenes shot in luxurious and kitschy interiors capable of well rendering this artificial and ephemeral world based on possessing and flaunting. In his rapid ascent, Bud almost doesn't have time to assimilate the sudden change in his life: "Is all this really real?" The director leaves room for a bit of utopian hope at the end. The young broker, with the support of his father (an intense Martin Sheen), manages to come to his senses and realize that what he plunged into so eagerly is a spiral without way out. He understands that he could end up like one of the companies dismantled by Gekko in the near future: he looks in the mirror, and what he sees he doesn't like. Stone ends the film offering a positive example of real repentance. As the camera rises framing New York from above, for yet another sunset of the film, he hopes that America and the rampant financial capitalism in general could follow that gesture.

Over 20 years have passed, and nothing has changed for the better. Wall Street is a cinematic work that's as relevant as few others: it's evident by the fact that a sequel is in production. Just reading the newspaper even casually on any given day is enough to verify that the monologue (which earned Michael Douglas an Oscar) in which Gekko fervently and tenaciously praises the superior value of greed still resonates in contemporary society. Accounting fraud, speculations, erroneous evaluations by rating agencies paid by the companies being judged, subprime mortgages, derivatives. Much of the dialogue in this film is painful truth.

"The richest 1% of the country owns over half of the country's P.I.L wealth. You're not so naive to believe we live in a democracy, are you, Buddy? It's the free market that reigns and we are part of it. We decide the news, the peace, the wars, the riots. Everything."

Ilfreddo