After going unexpectedly family-friendly with 2011’s Hugo,
Martin Scorsese pulls a dramatic 180 with The
Wolf of Wall Street, a nonstop barrage of drug-fueled decadence adapted by Terence Winter from
real-life
stockbroking swindler Jordan
Belfort’s memoir. The book is a distant relative of the truth,
it’s been said, and the film is a distant relative of the book. A big, unruly
bacchanal with a sizeable, sinister smile on its lips, the movie is a bit of a
contradiction, both abashed and
unashamed, spectacle and cautionary
tale, ode to and indictment of
dollars, depravity, and conspicuous consumption.
Disturbing and exciting, exhilarating and exhausting, the endlessly
entertaining film holds together by sheer virtue of its exuberant, furious
filmmaking energy. Scorsese might be the best cinematic connoisseur of
charismatic sociopaths, and Henry
Hill or Nicky Santoro
ain’t got nothing on Belfort. The Wolf of
Wall Street’s brokers are avatars of an age of heedless self-indulgence and
greed, gangsters with fountain pens instead of guns, slicing and dicing your
bank account and putting your savings in a vise rather than your head. And,
just like in the much less cynical and coked-up American
Hustle, you’ll cheer the con artists on and thank them for swindling
you when they’re done.
At first the character tries and fails to establish himself at a
blue-chip brokerage firm in the late ’80s (under the tutelage of a grinning, gleeful,
coked-out, humming Mephistopheles played by Matthew McConaughey) but gets
laid off in the market crash. The character reinvents himself on Long Island,
taking over a penny stock boiler room where he sticks out like an Armani
three-piece suit on a Walmart clearance rack. It’s not long before he grows
tired of “selling garbage to garbage men” and starts targeting the deep pockets
of the one percent, slapping the fake blueblood name Stratton Oakmont on his own
firm (started in the back room of a gas station while smoking crack), and raising
its value a few thousandfold, which attracts the attention of dogged F.B.I.
agent Patrick Denham (Kyle
Chandler). You see, Stratton Oakmont specialized in pump and dump
operations, artificially blowing up the price of nearly worthless stock and
then selling it at a huge profit, thus lowering its value and causing the
investors to lose their money. Like the ever-present whores at company
gatherings, clients were screwed and sent on their way.
DiCaprio’s Robin Hood-in-reverse assembles a team of merry men that are
as far from established stockbrokers (or other representatives of corporate
America) as humanly possible. Petty thugs, drug dealers, and high-school
dropouts one and all, Belfort’s devoted minions are Robbie “Pinhead” Feinberg
(Brian Sacca), Alden “Sea Otter” Kupferberg (Henry Zebrowski), the
dreadfully toupeed Nicky “Rugrat” Koskoff (P.J. Byrne), “The Depraved Chinaman”
Chester Ming (Kenneth Choi), and Brad Bodnick (Shane Bernthal), a neighborhood
hothead known as the Quaalude King of Bayside. This crew might not be as
dangerously violent—or concerned with codes of honor and tradition—as the
filmmaker’s former cinematic male camraderies, but the familiar testosterone
brotherhood is pure Scorsese. Stratton Oakmont’s enforcer is Belfort’s own galvanic,
short-fused dad (Rob Reiner),
who screams expletives about expenditures and debauchery even as he debates the
appropriate amount of pubic hair on strippers and prostitutes—all bought and
paid for with company cash.
As Belfort’s right hand man Donnie
Azoff —the Joe Pesci to DiCaprio’s Robert DeNiro—Jonah
Hill is electrifying in the film’s most flamboyant comic performance, a
buffoonish caricature of a WASP-ed up Jew decked out in garish, bleached
dentures, pastel sweaters and horn-rimmed glasses. Like the
uncharacteristically loose and
uninhibited DiCaprio, Hill doesn’t just
play the role, but inhales it, along with everything else that goes up the
characters’ noses and into their blood stream.
The Wolf of Wall Street plays
out like the jittery, fever-pitch, paranoid last thirty minutes of Goodfellas stretched
to three hours; the movie is in the thick of things, all the time, and, boy, do
things happen all the damn time: stock fraud and money laundering, taping wads
of cash to women’s bodies and sending them on trips to and from Switzerland to
deposit the millions (which gives Jean Dujardin a lot
to do with his crocodile smile), nearly crashed helicopters and nearly sunk
ships, snorting off prostitutes’ backsides and blow jobs behind the wheel of a Ferrari,
slow-motion Quaalude binges and sped-up coke orgies, drugged-out, frenzied
montages to music, elaborate tracking shots, fast dollies and faster whip-pans.
The high—or low—point of the film is a Quaalude bender that spirals
into comic madness. Experiencing a delayed reaction to decades-old drugs,
Belfort and Azoff skip the tingle, slur, drool, and amnesia stages and discover
a whole new stage: cerebral palsy. A blubbering, freaking out Azoff stuffs his
face and passes out. Belfort, almost fully paralyzed during a panicked phone
call about the federal investigation and his money, crawls to his car one
agonizing inch at a time, a painfully slow and hilarious race against time to
stop Azoff from talking shop over a tapped phone. The sequence culminates in an
epic, explosively funny battle over the kitchen telephone between two men with
completely obliterated motor skills.
The Wolf of Wall Street is an
excessive film about excess, about the compulsive appetites of loathsome men,
and the director’s own appetite for his subjects and their sleazy pleasures
seems bottomless. The movie is three hours long, reportedly cut down by
Scorsese’s longtime collaborator, master editor Thelma Schoonmaker
from four; it’s a testament to the filmmaker and the actors that we could
imagine watching these cackling swine for double that time and never cease to
be intrigued.
It is the viewer’s choice whether to read this all as celebration or as
condemnation; my feelings stray towards the latter.
The film might be vulgar and voyeuristic, but it is not—as accused—amoral;
Scorsese and his movie make it pretty clear that they find this behavior
disgusting and the characters grotesque and degenerate. Like well-dressed
animals in luxurious, lushly decorated terrariums, the characters are filmed in
distorting angles, through warping lenses and often from disorienting
perspectives.
McConaughey’s drumming, thumping and rumble singing becomes the anthem
of Belfort’s firm, and why not? The almost feral, tribal tune suggests the wild
war cry of barbarians on constant, ruthless rampage. But there is a sick sense
of pleasure to be gleaned from the alpha male posturing, profit-making, and
howling. The film is so acerbic you almost leave with a sour taste in your
mouth, a scathing satire unremittingly cynical and critical, but it’s also
honest. It fascinates as much as it disgusts; by the end we’re fascinated by
our own disgust and disgusted by our fascination. If there was no appeal to
this kind of behavior, no one would ever engage in it; if the “good life”
wasn’t alluring and the system didn’t allow for so many clear getaways, there
would be no Jordan Belforts.
The Wolf of Wall Street goes beyond antihero worship. It’s not
about the money, the women, and the drugs, and certainly not about Wall
Street—every time Belfort, breaking the fourth wall, starts explaining his
Darwinian financial wheeling and dealing, he stops mid-sentence to interject
something along the lines of “but you don’t really want to hear all of this,”
and resume the activities we’re supposedly interested in: the booze, the
broads, and all those pills and powder. At its caustic core, The Wolf of Wall Street is a movie about
addiction, not to drugs, power, or money, so much as to a way of life, to all
the empty, glittering promises of the American Dream, false promises we
eagerly, if silently, agree on, a collective handshake on fiction-made-truth.
(So think about that the next time you ride the subway; Chandler’s clean-cut
federal agent certainly does, in a brief, wordless scene that speaks volumes.)
Goodfellas,
Scorsese’s finest plunge into the low life, ends on Henry Hill’s teasingly
ambiguous smile. In The Wolf of Wall Street’s
last moments, Scorsese turns his gaze on Belfort’s audience, suggesting it is
our own greed—or at least naiveté—that feeds his. The reason guys like Belfort
exist is because we, their enablers, are as addicted as they are. Like Belfort,
we want more, more, more, never getting enough of anything, We get a contact
high from following the stockbrokers, entrepreneurs, con artists, CEOs’ (or whatever
they might be) exports, we egg them on and rejoice when they skirt the rules
that restrict the rest of us. We turn them into disreputable folk heroes,
reveling in and living vicariously through their success, letting them
represent us even as they’re robbing us blind. The addiction, ours and theirs, is to the
thrill of the theft, of the narrow escapes, the lies they tell, and the lives
they ruin. The problem is not that we might want to be like Belfort, but that
we already are. Please visit The Electric Feast for more movie, music, television, technology, gaming and culture reviews.
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