No, see I totally get the casting choices here. I completely get it and think Carey was probably the most accurate of the casting choices. The worst was Josh Brolin by far.
I'm really good at the casting thing, more so on indie flicks then mainstream movies but I take film pretty seriously. Look, let me walk you through my theory. I'm going to give you the backstory of the film as if it were based on a book where that was made into a film. Obviously there is no book, I'm giving you my best guess at what the backstory would be.
Ok, Gecko is loaded right most of his life, goes away to prison. I'm assuming his family and kids were taken care of via a family trust. This meant Carey went to a top notch boarding school. I'm betting she was totally hot in high school, probably pretty normal. When she goes off to her liberal arts college, she starts reading "The Nation" and "Mother Jones", chops her hair off and dyes it and starts attending feminist rallies. Basically becomes an uber liberal that looks down on society and money and abhors the thought she is the daughter of Gecko.
I'll give you a perfect real life example.
Exhibit A: Rachael Maddow.
Before pic in high school:
After pic when she becomes unattractive left wing nut job.
Now, Carey goes to school and meets Shia's character. For all practical purposes, Shia is a wimpy limp wristed tree hugger that could have gone either way, left wing non profit job, or Wall Street. He chose Wall Street but as we see in this movie, this kid wants to start his own left wing blog and is probably 48 hours away from becoming a regular guest on the Rachel Maddow show. This is why Carey falls for him. She figures she can nudge him over.
So why is this important? Because using a hot chic to play the role of the girlfriend when Oliver Stone was clearly trying to project his own liberal views on Wall Street, one where it's corrupted by white frat boy jocks who voted for Reagan with this new neo-liberal that works on Wall Street but still attends left wing rallies and secretly wishes Al Gore was President.
See, the reason why Brolin was miscast is there should be have been a more white boy, old school, and far younger character. Let me suggest Barry Pepper who played the role to the T in the movie "The 25th Hour".
See, this character would have been the guy who would have tried to corrupt Shia more, introduce him to money, hot chics, drugs, you name it. He would have more aptly represented the "I don't give a shit crowd" much better then Brolin. He would been more about the make money now, who cares about the consequences later. This character was played to perfection in Bret Easton Ellis's novel
"American "Psycho".
The fact of the matter is, Wall Street now is not full of the big muscle bound jocks from the 80's that stereotyped Wall Street. It's full of skinny pricks that weigh 90 lbs with 3 math degrees. They look like girls and date girls that look like boys. And both voted for Obama.
I said it before and I'll say it again, this movie would have been better off to not be a sequel instead it should have been a stand alone flick about the crisis. The problem is Stone never would have gotten the money to make the film. Even with the title the film bombed making barely 50 million domestically. Obviously not a great film, but the casting outside of Brolin was spot on.
