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narcasseHaving watched Wall Street sporadically on a day off I’m well aware that the fact that I watched it in segments in between doing other things may have had some effect on my perception of the film. Mostly though I suspect it’s the fact that I’ve seen far too many films following the same general plot that’s helped generate my low opinion of it. There are an awful lot of films out there that feature a main character who wants to succeed and who then ends up doing nefarious things to succeed, only to realise that he’s compromised his own integrity and thus takes steps to rectify the situation. If the film’s done well then it makes for a reasonable moral tale but if it’s done badly it comes across as a ploy to convince the viewer that they don’t want to succeed at all because it’ll just make them unhappy. And as Cabaret puts it: “If you happen to be rich and you find you left by your lover though you moan and you groan quite a lot you can take it on the chin, call a cab, and begin to recover on your fourteen-carat yacht.”
In that light Wall Street actually delivers the moral of the story rather well with the main character knowing full well that he’d chosen to break the law and realising that if he wanted to continue to live that life he’d have to screw over the father he was extremely close to. Actually showing the father-son bond was a particularly nice touch since the film didn’t just jump to the ridiculous ties of blood=emotional connect conclusion that both fiction and reality seem to trip up on. Likewise the fact that to gain he’d be breaking the law really brought home the seriousness of the main character’s decision: he couldn’t just passively gain, he had to be an active participant. For those little touches I’d class Wall Street as a fairly good film but not terribly impressive. I do suspect that the fact that I’d seen quite a few more recent films with the same theme put me off regarding it more highly, as well as the fact that I just can’t seem to buy into the excitement of stockbroking. In fact, I do recall once upon a time at a university that will go unnamed the proposal of creating a ‘stockbroking society’ where members would put up their own money and attempt to play the market. I can’t remember what the proposed initial contribution was or if it even got off the ground but evidently some people find the idea enthralling.
How to Lose Friends and Alienate People on the other hand while funny enough seemed to fall into the latter ‘don’t succeed because you’ll hate it’ category. In this case while the main character had to make moral judgements they didn’t seem particularly moral in the first place. It came off as more a case of somebody who didn’t want to actually follow the system instead of someone making a stand for the sake of their integrity. Later on that developed but by then I didn’t really care that the main character had managed to get what he wanted and then discovered that he didn’t really want it. Though possibly that was because his ultimate aim seemed to be to sleep with a certain actress so I wasn’t entirely sure why I was meant to empathise all that deeply with him in the first place.
The entire problem with this film was that there didn’t seem to be all that much of an effort made to persuade the viewer that the main character’s actions, when he refused to cooperate with the established system, were right. In Wall Street the main character is breaking the law, in The Firm the main character is aiding criminals, even in Devil’s Advocate the main character is adhering to the letter of the law while entirely contravening the spirit of it but in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People it just comes down to the main character’s personal judgement and there really isn’t much to recommend his judgement considering his behaviour. If a film’s going to ride on the main character’s integrity then it needs to demonstrate that said character has some integrity in the first place and it needs to do that pretty early on, especially if, unlike The Devil Wears Prada, it doesn’t even bother to show the main character becoming more and more distanced from their loved ones as an obvious demonstration of how their actions are actually damaging.
In that light Wall Street actually delivers the moral of the story rather well with the main character knowing full well that he’d chosen to break the law and realising that if he wanted to continue to live that life he’d have to screw over the father he was extremely close to. Actually showing the father-son bond was a particularly nice touch since the film didn’t just jump to the ridiculous ties of blood=emotional connect conclusion that both fiction and reality seem to trip up on. Likewise the fact that to gain he’d be breaking the law really brought home the seriousness of the main character’s decision: he couldn’t just passively gain, he had to be an active participant. For those little touches I’d class Wall Street as a fairly good film but not terribly impressive. I do suspect that the fact that I’d seen quite a few more recent films with the same theme put me off regarding it more highly, as well as the fact that I just can’t seem to buy into the excitement of stockbroking. In fact, I do recall once upon a time at a university that will go unnamed the proposal of creating a ‘stockbroking society’ where members would put up their own money and attempt to play the market. I can’t remember what the proposed initial contribution was or if it even got off the ground but evidently some people find the idea enthralling.
How to Lose Friends and Alienate People on the other hand while funny enough seemed to fall into the latter ‘don’t succeed because you’ll hate it’ category. In this case while the main character had to make moral judgements they didn’t seem particularly moral in the first place. It came off as more a case of somebody who didn’t want to actually follow the system instead of someone making a stand for the sake of their integrity. Later on that developed but by then I didn’t really care that the main character had managed to get what he wanted and then discovered that he didn’t really want it. Though possibly that was because his ultimate aim seemed to be to sleep with a certain actress so I wasn’t entirely sure why I was meant to empathise all that deeply with him in the first place.
The entire problem with this film was that there didn’t seem to be all that much of an effort made to persuade the viewer that the main character’s actions, when he refused to cooperate with the established system, were right. In Wall Street the main character is breaking the law, in The Firm the main character is aiding criminals, even in Devil’s Advocate the main character is adhering to the letter of the law while entirely contravening the spirit of it but in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People it just comes down to the main character’s personal judgement and there really isn’t much to recommend his judgement considering his behaviour. If a film’s going to ride on the main character’s integrity then it needs to demonstrate that said character has some integrity in the first place and it needs to do that pretty early on, especially if, unlike The Devil Wears Prada, it doesn’t even bother to show the main character becoming more and more distanced from their loved ones as an obvious demonstration of how their actions are actually damaging.
