Other People's Money

Directed by: Norman Jewison

RS: Not Rated

1916 Comedy

Other People's Money

617 11-4-91
Few actors can better Danny DeVito at playing sleazebags who cover their malevolence with butterball charm. So a film of Jerry Stemer's 1989 stage hit Other People's Money, with DeVito as corporate raider Larry "the Liquidator" Garfinkle, should be spot-on. Garfinkle gobbles up companies faster than the doughnuts he keeps in his office and limo. He is pure predator; a gross troll in a classy suit. Yet the pleasure he takes in the art of the deal is wickedly infectious. Cross Gordon Gekko, the shark Michael Douglas played in Wall Street, with Richard III and you get some idea of the magnetic monster at hand.

DeVito digs into the role with gusto. Never mind that Kevin Conway created the part brilliantly onstage. Hollywood's motto holds: In stars we trust. My point is that Sterner's play requires a black-comic sensibility to fire the plot, and DeVito the actor has it. DeVito the director has it in spades -- in Throw Momma From the Train and The War of the Roses, you can sense his diabolical glee behind the camera. Other People's Money deserved DeVito as a director. Instead, it got Norman Jewison, who has teamed up with screenwriter Alvin Sargent to retain the surface of the play but gut its soul.

Jewison (A Soldier's Story, Agnes of God) and Sargent (Julia, Ordinary People) specialize in cleaning up other people's material. Poor Sterner. What set him apart from other satirists of Wall Street greed was the way he made us see our complicity in the pig years of the Eighties, when watching the Milkens and Boeskys hit the jackpot carried a vicarious charge. Sterner got down in the muck, where ethical questions paled next to the dirty little thrill of making it at someone else's expense. From their pulpit of hindsight, Jewison and Sargent take a superior attitude that robs Other People's Money of its vulgar dynamism. Sterner's characters have been scrubbed, slapped on the wrist and taught to behave -- they've been invaded by the body snatchers.

For starters, scratch the name Garfinkle. The Bronx-born speculator is now the less-ethnic Garfield. To indicate the softy beneath the bluster, we see the beast at home, bathed in soft light as he practices the violin, surrounded by objects d'art. What a sham! The movie is most pertinent and fun when it simply shows this creep in action. Haskell Wexler's camera work captures the chill coming off the surfaces of the sleek, hollow world in which Garfield trades insults with his secretary (the invaluably cheeky Mo Gaffney) and rages at his army of lawyers.

Garfield has his eye on the outmoded but debt-free New England Wire and Cable Company, located in what he calls a "shit pit" Rhode Island town. He plans to buy controlling interest and then sell. Garfield couldn't care less about the hundreds he'll put out of work; his interest is the stockholder. "I'm a modern-day Robin Hood," he says. "I take from the rich and give to the upper middle class."

Andrew "Jorgy" Jorgenson, the company's aging chairman played by Gregory Peck, is outraged. The plant's been in Jorgy's family for nearly a century, and he means to pass it on to the company's president, Bill Coles (Dean Jones, in a welcome return to movies after a decade of fighting typecasting in light-comic roles). Bea Sullivan (Piper Laurie), Jorgy's loyal assistant and longtime mistress, helps in the good fight by bringing in her hotshot lawyer daughter, Kate (Penelope Ann Miller), to take on Garfield.

Sterner drew these battle lines in swift, witty strokes without sacrificing complexity. He showed how Garfield's avarice cut him off from feeling, just as Jorgy's traditionalism blinded him to truth. Jorgy turns a deaf ear to Kate's strategies to save the company, in the form of white knights, shark repellents and poison pills. The movie turns a deaf ear as well. Jewison probably thinks audiences will doze at hearing Wall Street lingo, no matter how vital it is to understanding the shaky economy of the Nineties. So the film's focus shifts to Garfield's lech for Kate.

Jewison drops the ball by casting perennial ingenue Miller (Big Top Peewee, Awakenings) in a role that calls for a firebrand. Kate is more than what Garfield calls "a broad with a mouth"; she's a woman with experience and the sass to throw it around. Onstage, Mercedes Ruehl strikingly filled the bill. Miller, outfitted in absurdly provocative outfits and spike heels, makes Kate look like she studied law at Eileen Ford. She's hopeless trying to parry Garfield's lewd advances by telling him to put his hand between his legs and "look down at the little guy and say, 'You must behave yourself in the presence of a lady.'" DeVito needs an equal, a sparring partner, to make these scenes work; now his Garfield is just a wolf pursuing a babe.

Sargent also hinders Miller by divesting her role of motivation. Sterner made it clear that Kate resents her mother and Jorgy for carrying on while Kate's father was still alive. Now she's merely the dutiful daughter. This allows Peck to do his patented statesman routine without being hampered by dirty linen. Jorgy has principles all right, but Sterner painted him as a hypocrite who was too cheap to spend the money or take the action that might support them. At the film's big shootout, in which Jorgy and Garfield plead their cases before the stockholders, DeVito gives a whiplash intensity to Garfield's gospel of pragmatism. But he's no match for Peck's Jorgy, at least not to Jewison. The director films Peck as if he were Abraham Lincoln ("Here we care for more than the price of our stock. Here we care about people"), a great man even in the face of defeat.

Sterner wrote a bitterly funny satire; he knew it was just as dangerous to trust Jorgy as it was to believe Larry the Liquidator. At the end of the play, Kate goes to work for Garfinkle, marries him and has twins. Their happy ending is an effectively scary piece of reality. But Sargent and Jewison have foolishly updated a tale of Eighties greed to fit the myth of the kinder, gentler Nineties. Onscreen, Garfield gets no further with Kate than a lunch date. And forget Kate joining him to play Monopoly with people's lives; she's too busy helping to rebuild the businesses that Garfield destroys. Other People's Money sells its audience short by trading a risky play for a safe investment in wishful thinking. Jorgy will love it.