Oliver Stone’s Wall Street gave us the iconic, and chronically misused, aphorism “greed is good,” but the movies generally love to show us the opposite.
History is positively lousy with movies in which avaricious characters get what’s coming to them—whose greed is punished, in one way or another.
Real life tends to be much more complicated. American capitalism is particularly well-suited to funneling money from the poor to the already very rich, who then set aside a statistically insignificant amount of that wealth to lobby politicians to pass advantageous tax laws, crush pesky regulations, and smash the unions that might give working-class types more leverage. If greed isn’t good, it certainly seems lucrative. I suppose we can hope that they at least feel a little bit bad about it while soaking in bathtubs full of Dom Pérignon and wiping their butts with Prada bags (I don’t know any rich people; I assume this is what they do).
As Citizen Kane’s Mr. Bernstein put it so succinctly: “...it’s no trick to make a lot of money...if all you want to do is make a lot of money.” Perhaps we can take some comfort in the fact that having a lot of money doesn’t make one particularly interesting. So here’s a sampling of some of the best movies about greed’s power to corrupt the human soul (in a metaphorical sense).
