The Hand (1981) + Wall Street (1987) [20th Anniversary Edition] – DVDs

THE HAND
*/**** Image B+ Sound B Commentary B
starring Michael Caine, Andrea Marcovicci, Annie McEnroe, Bruce McGill
screenplay by Oliver Stone, based on the novel The Lizard's Tail by Marc Brandel
directed by Oliver Stone

WALL STREET
**/**** Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Michael Douglas, Charlie Sheen, Daryl Hannah, Terence Stamp
screenplay by Stanley Weiser & Oliver Stone
directed by Oliver Stone

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Sometimes, our stated moral goals don't add up to who we are. It is said, with some justification, that the personal is political, but all too often this is taken to mean "there is no personal, there is only political": we pretend that the ideology to which we pledge allegiance is the sum total of our ethical standpoint, then use that to justify or paper over the contradictions and fissures in the way we live our lives. The ironic thing is that our refusal to acknowledge that which lies outside our ideology means we do that ideology a disservice–playing out our personal grudges on the political stage when we should be harmoniously integrating both sides into a whole life.

Oliver Stone would be a good example of this. For two decades, he's been Hollywood's ostensible left-wing shit disturber, weighing in on the historical nightmare that befell him in Vietnam and implicitly or explicitly linking it to the various political mechanisms behind it. Unfortunately, lefty and war veteran aren't the only items on his resume: he's also got big-time mommy and daddy issues, which he then refracts through the prism of the "dying king" JFK or the overbearing mother that is Richard Nixon. Stone personalizes his politics, all right, but he does it for the sake of wounded macho paranoia that doesn't begin to be relevant to the discussion. Moreover, in talking about such feelings through politics, he often renders those politics invisible. A discussion of one of his few non-didactic films (the early thriller The Hand), then, has bearing on one of his would-be didactic films (the insider-trading snoozer Wall Street) in that it helps delineate the Stone beneath the spin and give an idea of how far he has to go before he can truly add to the discussion.

The Hand was made in the wake of Midnight Express, the hilariously irresponsible Turkish-prison romp that afforded Stone more clout than your average screenwriter. He used that leverage to make his second feature (following the little-seen exploitation item Seizure), apparently under commercial circumstances that have nothing to do with his later polemics. Still, it's obvious that macho rage is driving this train. Jonathan Lansdale (Michael Caine) is given away by the fact that he draws a Conan-style comic strip called Mandro (Stone scripted John Milius's Conan the Barbarian); furthermore, he admits that his brainchild is a doer, not a thinker, meaning he's not one for sissy introspection. And the crisis is that his younger wife, Anne (Anne Marcovici), is trying to detach from him in a cowardly fashion, mainly by going away to New York to "discover herself" on his dime and with his daughter in tow. Lansdale makes the mistake of arguing with this duplicitous ingrate while driving, resulting in an accident that severs his writing hand, thus destroying his ability to draw Mandro and be any sort of decent provider. It's glaringly obvious that Stone is thinking of a certain appendage–and it ain't no freakin' hand.

Now, to be fair, the movie attempts a half-hearted auto-critique of such a mentality. The Hand's gimmick is that the hand starts acting on the aggressive urges Lansdale secretly fantasizes, scribbling all over the work of the hack hired to replace him and rubbing out people who cross him. This projection of his anger forces our man to consider the cost of his constant invocation of male imperative–especially when it kills his lover Stella (Annie McEnroe) and her admittedly-grotesque other man, Brian (Bruce McGill). Thing is, Stone doesn't exactly get to the source. Lansdale's macho idiocy is related not to society or to personal trauma: it's something innate that he can't just chuck. In the final scene, the hand offs a female shrink who's been trying to convince him that it's not the hand, but Lansdale himself. So in one sense, Stone acknowledges that male behaviour is undesirable, while in another, he shrugs his shoulders and says, "Whaddya gonna do?"

There's precious little psycho-hand action (not necessarily a bad thing when you consider the quality of the special effects), leaving long stretches of banal talk involving Anne. Though Anne is clearly the lesser of two evils, she's painted as a poser who allies herself with the pretentious human-potential movement; and while she gets most of the exposition about what's gone on in the relationship, it's clear that she's a non-fully-functioning person designed chiefly to annoy her husband. After Lansdale starts teaching at a two-bit college, he's magnanimously handed Stella as a student to boff and have further angst with, including the triangle with fellow hack teacher Brian. Stone would go on to confound you with his politics in his subsequent films, making you think more was going on than actually was–but here, it's just the unexamined life of a male jerk, rendered in boring tones and with lousy dialogue.

Six years later, Wall Street finds Stone in different fortunes. Having scored a coup with the smash hit/Oscar juggernaut Platoon, he suddenly became a big director AND a political thinker. And so he set about making polemical movies…with the same male imperatives and lack of reflection as his studio debut. This one traps young trader Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) between two fathers: literal/Good one Carl (Martin Sheen), who's worked his blue-collar butt off at struggling Bluestar Airlines; and figurative/Bad one Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), the insider-trading shark who takes ambitious Bud under his wing. The ultra-simplistic idea is that Bud should value hard work and honesty over free-market evil, but the truth is that Stone has some kind of emotional connection to the idea of a Good Father and would like it to be as simple as choosing the right side of the Force. It isn't. In saying Just Say No to capitalism (which we can hardly be expected to do, since it's the molasses that surrounds us and gums us up), Stone merely interpolates his personal need for a daddy over the political exigencies of the unrestrained market.

I've gone on record as saying that Platoon is a good movie, but more for its atmosphere than anything else–for the horrifying details of tarps blown off corpses and the sense of fear and loathing only a veteran would know. It, too, is a Good Father/Bad Father movie, but Stone doesn't depict the machinations of capitalism as vividly as he does the machinations of war trauma: almost every political point in Wall Street is rendered in a Stanley Kramer-ish speech spit out so randomly that it has evaporated by the next scene. The rest of the film is tactile, but it's tactility that completely fetishizes the environment we're supposed to be renouncing. Even though I appreciated the hilariously tacky décor of Bud's eventual crash pad (so frivolously po-mo as to deconstruct its owner), mostly the film can't look away at wealth and power any more than its protagonist. Pretty words are spoken, yet nobody's buying it–a matter belied by the fact that Gekko's "greed is good" speech is the one thing anybody remembers from this movie. Gekko is entertaining in a way the other characters are not; left with nothing else, we root for him in spite of ourselves.

Bud only figures out which way the wind is blowing when Gekko offers a sweet deal to fix Bluestar, then decides to strip it for its assets–this after Bud has been made his bagman, engaging in insider back-scratching and industrial espionage. Bad men have corrupted him, and getting rid of these bad men (as opposed to accepting accountability) is the object of Wall Street. Who are those bad men, though? What drives their own need, and how many of them had seats on the board at Fox in '87? The point is clearly not to reveal the culture of entitlement and intimidation within these financial walls, or else Stone's mad ambition and penchant for dick-swinging might face the axe. Rather, it's to satiate a need for a good father in the face of a bad one–an identification with the angels that obscures the director's own implication in the system in which he's involved. A bit more self-awareness might have made for a better movie, but of course, that might have also made him persona non grata in H'wood.

THE DVDs
Released on DVD individually and as part of Warner's Twisted Terror Collection, The Hand gets slightly short shrift on the format. The 1.78:1, 16×9-enhanced image is dynamic, if a bit wobbly in the colour department, with skin tones often registering as especially strange. Meanwhile, the Dolby 2.0 Surround sound is clear but, considering the movie's vintage, unsurprisingly limp and unspectacular. The only major extra is a feature commentary by Stone: although the director won't disown the film, he characterizes it as compromised and seems aware of not only its rather limited importance, but also the minor flubs (such as the lame effects) that detract from the presentation. Thematics are touched on, but Stone doesn't get into pretentious detail, a fact for which I am grateful. The Hand's trailer rounds out the disc.

Fox reissues Wall Street in a deluxe, two-disc affair to commemorate the film's twentieth anniversary. The dated-looking 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer is pretty mediocre, rendering the colours in muddy, oversaturated tones that fail to provide much of a sense of the production design's hard-sheen detail. Dolby 5.1 and 4.0 listening options grace the disc, and they're even less to write home about, again not offering much in the way of dimension or detail and rendering the surround channels largely superfluous. Extras break down as follows:

Commentary by Oliver Stone
Stone wastes no time in telling us that Hal Holbrook's Lou Mannheim character (head of the firm at which Bud works) is based on his own father, and that his father was a similarly no-nonsense individual, and how much this is the world of his father. QED. Some other talk of the movie's ideas and performances is facile and self-serving, albeit delivered in the measured tones of someone who doesn't realize it.

Introduction by Oliver Stone
A totally needless intro whereby Stone notifies us that we're watching the disc, that it "seems like yesterday," and that there's good stuff here. Duly noted.

"Greed is Good" (56 mins.)
An alternately interesting and self-congratulatory take on the film's verisimilitude: various Wall Street types vouch for the film's accuracy while the cast and director weigh in on the greed of the '80s. One shudders to think that a generation of traders got in on the seductive stench of Gordon Gekko, but there it is–though one person incredibly believes that Bill Gates is the model of the other way through his charity.

"Money Never Sleeps: The Making of Wall Street" (47 mins.)
This is mostly an actor's piece: key cast members (minus a gossiped-about Hannah) discuss their various scenes, deal with Stone's penchant for giving line-readings, explain how their tense relationship with him helped shape their performances, etc. Some interesting father-and-son stuff between Sheen Sr. and Jr.; otherwise, you practically gotta be into the movie to care.

Deleted Scenes
12 in total, featuring optional Stone commentary. There's an initial scene where Bud tries to pick up soon-to-be paramour Darien Taylor (Daryl Hannah) before his fateful meet at Gekko's, a lot of strictly atmospheric, wisely excised party scenes, some interesting alternate takes of various speeches that didn't make the cut, Penn Jillette being strong-armed into shady trading by Bud, and Oliver Stone fluffing his one line over and over again. Unlike most outtakes, they actually give you more of an appreciation for the film and for the process.

• The Hand
  105 minutes; R; 1.78:1 (16×9-enhanced); English Dolby Surround, French Dolby Surround; CC; English, French, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Warner
• Wall Street
  126 minutes; R; 1.85:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 5.1, English DD 4.0, French DD 2.0 (Mono), Spanish DD 2.0 (Mono); CC; English, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9 + DVD-5; Region One; Fox