Wall Street (1987)

Re-watching Wall street made me reflect not so much on greed as on desperation and insecurity. Gordon Gekko is of course what this movie is famous for but what grabbed my attention was the young broker, trying to make it in the world of stock gambling. For me, what was moving about the film is the relation between the increasingly successful and increasingly rich broker and his working-class dad, an aircraft mechanic and a union man. The film digs into the self-deception involved in much social mobility and even though it hardly does so subtly, there is some real tension between these characters that I found much more interesting than the steely mannerisms of Michael Douglas. I come to think of Laurent Cantet's marvellous class struggle movie Resources Humaine and the way the hurt  of class differences is brought out there. The focus of Wall street may lie elsewhere (profit-hunting gamblers on the stock market) than on class analysis, but that aspect is still there.