Oliver Stone was intent on making a film that critiqued the greedy and shark-like world of Wall Street. In the 1980s, however, it did not quite end up packing the critical punch that Stone had intended. In fact, quite the opposite: scores of business school students saw the story of Bud Fox's ascension in the business world as alluring and glamorous rather than cautionary.
In an article for Financial Times about the misinterpretation of the film, Francesco Guerrera wrote, "Why was Stone’s message in Wall Street undermined? Bill Winters, 48, a former head of JP Morgan’s investment bank, believes the filmmaker obscured the point he intended to make." Rather than make a film that focuses on the ravages of corporate raiding, Stone's focus on the more ambiguous elements of the stockbroking lifestyle left more room for viewers to identify with and valorize its more ethically unsavory characters.
The debate about whether depicting corporate greed in film serves to critique it or glorify it has come up for other films as well. Martin Scorsese's 2013 film The Wolf of Wall Street tells the story of corporate criminal Jordan Belfort, and many critics believed that the film did more to glamorize excess and violence than critique it. While Scorsese insisted that it was satirical, meant to show just how decadent Belfort really was, critics like Whitney Friedlander of Variety wrote, "The lead character cons both rich and poor, ingests copious amounts of cocaine and Quaaludes, endangers the lives and welfare of everyone he knows and essentially rapes his wife. For the “Entourage” generation, it’s a celebration of this lifestyle that tells them you can either have this for a short while before you get busted (something that’s mostly glossed over in the film) or you can forever be a rundown sadsack riding the subway and only glimpsing the good life, like Kyle Chandler’s FBI agent Patrick Denham."
