Last week, Kris and I came to a disagreement over the merits of Oliver Stone’s splashy, silly and consistently surface-level sequel “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.” Neither of us is disputing that the film is a mess, but where Kris thought it clumsy, ill-judged junk, I was more forgiving in my Cannes review: for me, the film partially succeeds on the level of campy self-satire.
One thing we can both agree on, however, is that subtlety is not in the film’s vocabulary — least of all when it comes to its gaudy collection of visual cues and symbols. Four months after watching the film, the one that sticks most insistently in my mind is a certain highly recognizable painting in the office of Josh Brolin’s character Bretton James.
Not content with underlining James’s Mephistophelean deviousness by clothing Brolin in a maroon-colored suit, Stone and ace production designer Kristi Zea (“GoodFellas,” “Revolutionary Road”) have Francisco Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Son” (pictured) as his office backdrop to drive home the capital-E Evil of the character.