'Wall Street' has a sequel, but is greed still good?

It might seem morbidly funny now, but Oliver Stone's "Wall Street" shocked audiences in 1987 with its portrait of the barracuda ethos infesting American high finance. Hence, the prospect of a sequel - "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps," opening Friday - raised a few obvious questions:

Could a work of fiction possibly match the reality of the past few years, with credit default swaps, foundering subprime mortgages and a cast of characters who make Captain Kidd look like Laa-Laa the Teletubby?

Could a returning Michael Douglas possibly make Gordon Gekko - the "Greed is good" guy of the original - seem like anything but a piker? As even Stone has to admit, over the past few years "the bankers became the Gekkos."

What no one could have calculated was the added attention brought to the movie by Douglas' recent illness - stage 4 cancer of the throat - or, given the severity of his illness, the upbeat attitude of the actor, who won a best actor Oscar for the first "Wall Street" and is talking about the whole matter as "just another chapter."

"It didn't cost Fox a lot," Douglas joked about the media attention his cancer has generated. In New York to promote the film, the actor looked a little gaunt and wore a tousle of unmanaged white hair that seemed to be approaching Einsteinian proportions. And he was frank about the future.

"My doctors are optimistic, I'm optimistic, I get radiation every day, chemo. ... Life goes on," he said. What keeps him upbeat is tennis, college football season and "a picture that's rockin'. What's not to like?"

Sweet revenge

The picture in question opens with the release from prison of Gekko, who has served eight years for the insider trading that got him arrested last time around. Shia LaBeouf plays Jake Moore, a young Wall Street hotshot who is living with Gekko's daughter, Winnie (Carey Mulligan), and watches the investment bank owned by his mentor, Louis Zabel (Frank Langella), get shot out from under him by the nefarious rumor-mongering and evildoings of the Gekko-like Bretton James (Josh Brolin). Jake wants revenge, and allies himself with the none-too-trustworthy Gordon to get it.

Stone, who used words like "whimsical" to describe his new film, said he had made a movie about people and their foibles - "love, lust, deceit, betrayal."

"I have to make a story people want to see," he said, not apologetically.

But Stone also is known for his left-leaning politics - he has made nonfiction films about Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez (as well as one feature - "W." - about a former Republican president). One of the more electrifying moments of "Money Never Sleeps" is a justification of the Bush-Obama bank bailouts. The right wing's richest bete noire, George Soros, consulted on the film ("He's an interesting man," Stone said). Which makes it a little odd that, by making a film for Fox, Stone is sort of working for Rupert Murdoch.

The director rubbed his face. "I have enough enemies, as Voltaire said - on his deathbed, by the way," he said, considering his studio alliance. "But Rupert's a very nice man when you meet him, and I made the first one for Fox, so they had the copyright."

An old-fashioned drama

Besides, what Stone prefers to stress about the film isn't its critique of banks, regulatory agencies or human greed ("I'm not delivering a jeremiad"), but its position as an old-fashioned drama. "It's like an old Darryl Zanuck film," he said, citing as an example the 1947 anti-Semitism drama "Gentleman's Agreement." "There's a socially conscious background, onto which we project human conflict."

What Stone seemed to regret is the lack of a working-class character in the film - not just because he didn't include one, he said, but because the realities of high finance and society wouldn't let him. It wouldn't have made sense, he said, to construct a plot like the first film's - in which the son of a union man (Charlie Sheen) betrayed his roots - because he said "unions have disappeared from our landscape."

"It's sad that our country has moved against the interests of the working man," he said. Which is why, he said, Susan Sarandon's character - Jake Moore's mother, a nurse-cum-real-estate saleswoman - is so important. She's the movie's only link to the people actually crushed by speculation and corporate chicanery.

"I'm from Long Island," Sarandon said, speaking for her character. "Part of the wonder of Shia's character is that he's come from somewhere unexpected." Her Long Island accent - she doesn't hang on her G's as much as eliminate consonants altogether - was the result of consultation and a dialect coach. "I hope it wasn't too much," she said. "But it kind of is." (Exteriors and interiors of her character's home were shot in Muttontown, the only scenes in the movie filmed on Long Island.)

The rest of the movie's characters exist in a rarefied universe of hundred-million-dollar trades, hot cars, women, arcane rules and unfathomable regulations. Stone, according to Douglas, "drove us all crazy getting into the details, for the 70 people who actually understand the script." But Stone sees it all as something far simpler, and natural. Very natural.

"It has a slick surface," the director said. "But it moves like a beast."