So I was literally about to make my first post on this here internet thingy about wine. WINE! I just had some good realizations about French vs. California wine, but I decided that I’m gonna give my tumblr page a few, more grounded posts before I let my pretentious oenophile flag fly. I’ll talk about Oliver Stone instead!

I watched Wall Street for the first time the other day, about a week after I had seen Platoon on IFC for the second time. I was wondering how anyone could make movies that were so watchable, so engaging, and yet so powerfully off-putting at the same time. Especially considering the fact that Stone and I usually fall on the same side of the political spectrum!

I think Stone’s problem is that he shies away from nuance at almost every narrative juncture in his movies. In Platoon, he essentially takes the story of the My Lai massacre (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai) and uses it to fictionalize a mass killing of innocent Vietnamese. But it’s not a big deal in the film - the massacre is portrayed as (at least somewhat) normal or expected. To Stone, the Vietnam war was the American Empire turning soldiers into killing machines and killing everything that moved. In reality, while the US committed a litany of atrocities in that war, the norm was not mass killing and raping of innocent civilians by small units of American soldiers.

Is it surprising that Stone manages to make controversial a war that anyone with a brain stem, liberal or conservative, already believes was a mistake? Not, I think, as surprising as the fact that Stone served in Vietnam. He was there, unlike almost any Vietnam film director, and yet he chose to take the nuance out of the story, creating the morally pure Willem Dafoe and the unspeakably evil Tom Berenger and figuratively putting them in a visual cage to fight to the death.

The truth is, I actually love this movie for its portrayal of the bleakness of war. But Stone goes beyond fictionalization - he belies the truth about the nature of the war. Stone takes a real and horrific event from Vietnam, My Lai, and passes it off as routine and ordinary, trying to paint the entire US military as evil and corrupt, or just morally bankrupt. Sure, there are a couple of throw-away lines where soldiers look off into the distance and say that they don’t like what they’re doing, but these lines don’t jive with the gravity of their alleged (in the movie, actual) crimes. There are plenty of evil and corrupt people in the military, just as there are real heroes like Dafoe’s character (though I believe the truth about anyone’s character is always more complex than it appears). If that’s Stone’s point, you would think he wouldn’t need to forcibly restructure our perception of the reality of that war to prove it.

In Wall Street, which I like a little more as a film, Stone portrays a young stock broker at the Stock Exchange, who uses inside information that his father unintentionally gives him to buy and sell stock in the father’s airline (the father, Martin Sheen, is an airline mechanic - not a company executive). Worse still, the young broker, Bud Fox, lets Gordon Gekko, a seriously rich, unethical and power-hungry investment banker, in on the deal.

Without getting into details, the story is very strong in this movie. But, just like Platoon, it falls victim to its own idealistic simplicity. Martin Sheen’s character is a union man, a lefty, and rife with populist rage. Nowhere does Stone provide the audience with any sense that this is an imperfect individual. Maybe he could be overtly religious or anti-intellectual, and that would cloud his judgment. But he is more of a buddha-like figure by the end of the movie. His only visible character flaw is his smoking habit, which is pretty cheap in the grand scheme of this movie.

Gekko is a great villain - always mysterious, sometimes greatly helpful and other times ruthless in his treatment of the hero. But Stone never hints at any character flaws (read: things that would make him slip up) on Gekko’s part in the entire movie, until the end, where one is made quite clear.

We get it - Wall Street is filled with money-grubbing crooks. But why does the hero’s dad have to be flawless? The message of this movie should be about the dangers/evils of greed, and yet we are also forced to recognize the nobility of the perfect leftist father, who, at one point, immediately refuses a deal with Gekko for no reason other than he doesn’t want to see Gekko make money, even though he would stand to make a lot of money himself. To most people, that type of ignorance would be off-putting. But Stone portrays him as a noble and stubborn lefty with a pure heart. The story would be strong enough if the Martin Sheen’s character were simply a good guy. Gekko would be just as evil to the audience. But Stone manages to create a divisively ideological father for the hero, making what could be a nearly flawless portrait of 1980s greed a simpler and loftier story of moral right and wrong.

Maybe I’m nitpicking. In fact, I am. That’s only because I essentially agree with Stone’s politics and only wish he could do a better job of showing the truth as it is, instead of creating truth where it doesn’t exist.