(NOTE: This article contains plot spoilers)
Those of us under the age of 25 might be surprised to know that the current economic downturn that’s keeping many of them from finding decent-paying jobs isn’t a new thing. Business cycles have been oscillating wildly ever since the invention of finance, and movies have always had plenty of opportunities to portray the chasm between the haves and have-nots as experienced through the stock market.
The last major economic dip happened during the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, as Main Street paid the tab for the non-stop Wall Street party that dominated the Reagan Era. One of the most enduring films to come out of that moment in time is “Wall Street,” starring Michael Douglas as corporate raider Gordon Gekko and Charlie Sheen as his willing protégé who must eventually choose between making money and doing something moral to save his blue-collar father’s company from ruin. Another, less-successful film that also used high finance and its impact on the Little Guy as a theme was 1991’s Other People’s Money, directed by Norman Jewison and based on a play by Jerry Sterner.
In the film Danny DeVito plays Larry “The Liquidator” Garfield. Like Gekko, Larry is a corporate raider who spends his days looking for profitable companies to put his money into. If he doesn’t like the way a company is being run, he buys up enough shares to put himself in a position where he can make dictate actions that maximize the company’s profitability, which may involve shutting the place down. The only people Larry’s life are his driver/butler and the gaggle of sycophants who work in his luxury Manhattan office.
Larry loves money. He says so in the movie’s opening scene with a speech that sounds like it was taken verbatim from the play. The film also makes clear from the outset that Larry is an asshole. He’s the kind of asshole who is so content to be an asshole that if someone in his life were to actually have the courage to call him an asshole, he would laugh in said person’s face before lighting up another cigarette, inhaling another donut and telling said person to get the fuck out of his office. Twenty years later Larry’s figurative offspring would be collecting huge fees for taking ridiculous dot-coms public and pushing sub-prime loans to people with no jobs.
Larry’s lover is a computer that tells him what stocks are doing well and are worth looking into for possible takeover. He’s given this machine a woman’s name and wakes up to it every morning as if they had just spent the night screwing. One day Larry’s lover-puter tells him about a Mom and Pop factory operation out in the sticks that is doing pretty well financially. He takes his limo out to the country and meets the owners, telling them that they need to get rid of an unprofitable business unit that makes copper wire. Mom and Pop don’t like the looks of this Armani-suit-wearing yahoo from The City, so they decide to try to defend the company from a hostile takeover. To do it, they recruit Mom’s daughter, Kate Sullivan, who is a big city lawyer and the only person they believe can help them save the company.
The lawyer and the corporate raider meet to begin negotiations, and thus begins one of the oddest and least interesting love stories put into wide theatrical release in the 1990s. I didn’t like this movie. The characters and situations aren’t appealing enough for it to be a standard romantic comedy and it’s not outrageous enough to be a farce or black comedy. There is one saving grace in the movie, and that’s Danny DeVito. The guy has so much natural presence and charm, he almost pulls off the impossible feat of making Larry someone worth caring about. I don’t think main characters have to be sympathetic or relatable, but as a viewer I do need to care what happens to them, and I didn’t care what happened to Larry.
The dynamic between Larry and the Kate is what makes this movie at once fascinating and repugnant. Straight away Larry is turned on by Kate, and she’s only too happy to oblige with come-hither looks and suggestive retorts to his unsubtle come-ons. Early in their relationship Larry tells Kate why he’s so into her. It’s because they have something in common – “We both care about the game more than we do the players.”
The sexual interplay between Kate and Larry is alternately boring and disgusting. At one point Larry suggests they play a game where they have sex and the first person to orgasm loses the deal (and the factory). But what if we come together, Kate asks. I hadn’t thought about that, Larry responds. I need to go somewhere to throw up, I tell my TV screen.
On this point I have to agree with Larry. From the start, it’s not clear to me if Kate was ever on the side of her family’s factory. Her feelings about being part of the family business are made clear by the fact that she got as far away from them as she possibly could, in spirit if not in distance. Unlike Bud Fox, Kate does not seem to be wrestling with the morality of the situation.
I don’t really blame her for wanting to get away. The characters at the mill are ridiculously moral and homespun in an impossibly bucolic town. Gregory Peck plays the factory’s patriarch, Andrew “Jorgy” Jorgenson, written to be the representative of Everything Good and Right With American Small Business. He and everyone around him are slathered in a thick fog of “homespun.”
Upon accepting the task of helping the business, her main advice for the factory’s managers is to give Larry what he wants and hope he goes away, something they really didn’t need her to tell them. The film’s central theme seems to be that in the multimillion dollar winner-take-all world of Wall Street, there is little difference between sex and financial deal making. Eventually Larry and Kate get to the point where they’re kissing in a Japanese restaurant, small concepts like “conflict of interest” be damned.
The plight of the worker-bees is incidental. The masses are nowhere to be seen except as window dressing. A union is nowhere to be found. The workers are shown anxiously milling around the factory, waiting for the shareholders to decide their fate.
At one point a worker goes up to Jorgy and asks him is everything going to be okay, with the same vocal tone of a small child who just heard a rumor his parents are getting divorced. Now, now, don’t worry, Jorgy responds, everything is going to be all right. The worker bows humbly and returns to his station.
This set up of the upper class playing their games with the fate of the little guys hanging in the balance but nowhere to be seen. The movie’s dynamic is similar to that of the 1939 classic “The Rules of the Game.” The players that matter treat the whole thing like a parlor diversion.
Eventually, Larry wins a proxy battle that sets him up to control the factory’s fate. I found it interesting that every option they come up with results in both of them getting paid anyway – A tacked-on ending suggests everyone is going to walk away happy, a “win-win” in MBA parlance. Kate makes Larry a proposition - instead of making wire, what if the factory workers switched to making steel mesh for car airbags? I’ll think about it, Larry says, if you go to dinner with me tonight. Sure, she says, apparently eager to add prostitution to her list of professional misconducts. Larry dances with glee in his office, probably dreaming about the inevitable three-way with Kate and his stock ticker.
This movie gives plenty of ammunition to anyone whose main theme of business is “they’re all in this together.” I’m still not sure why at the end of the film I’m supposed to be happy that this guy is happy. Maybe that was Jewison’s point.
This kind of movie is ripe for a remake, but only as a farce. It's not a great film, or even a good one. The class distinctions, the broadly drawn caricatures that show the divide between the people with money and everybody else, is the thing they got right – the players don’t matter, only the game.
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