Movie No. 5 of 2014—Wolf Of Wall Street
Scorsese and co. show you the money, the sex, the drugs—and it’s looks pretty even when it’s ugly. Kubrick might have approved.
So you just arrived in the cinema? No, don’t bother with the popcorn—that’s for people who can’t afford cocaine. I mean, you can’t snort a kernel of popcorn through a hundred-dollar bill, right? Hey, I’m f****** kidding, I love popcorn just as much as the other person. It’s just that after you’ve eaten it off the naked body of a hooker, regular f******* popcorn from a f******* cardboard tub just doesn’t taste the same, you know?
Yes, I know the movie’s starting. DON’T F****** TELL ME TO KEEP QUIET! I could buy out this whole theatre, motherf*****! Don’t yell—I didn’t throw that wad of bills that hard at you. No, why don’t you shut up? Or shall I just come and shove my money down your throat?
Well, mister, you should keep quiet—this movie gets pretty loud at times. In addition to the array of nominations it has garnered, Wolf of Wall Street has generated a fair amount of controversy about its alleged glorification of the characters’ dissolute lifestyles. It has also attained the dubious honour of the movie with an all-time record number of 569 F-words.
Clocking in at three hours long, the film charts the rise and fall of money-hungry Jordan Belfort as he opens his own brokerage firm with a few of his inner-city childhood friends. They pressure both well-heeled investors and blue-collar workers into buying penny stocks, earning four-figure commissions with every deal made. We follow them from a garage in Long Island to an office tower on Wall Street, and are given a taxonomic overview of both substances to abuse and prostitutes to use. We see Belfort swap his first wife for a younger, blonder one, all while presiding over his hot-shot company.
The main trading floor of Belfort’s brokerage features some energetic set-pieces: hookers running amok, a near-naked marching band, dwarves being hurled into a velcro bullseye. Scorsese swivels the camera around this massive room, drenching us in the debauchery. It is on the stage at the front of this trading floor that DiCaprio—taking more than a few cues from megachurch preachers, motivational speakers, and Roman emperors—delivers several full-blooded, fiery orations, whipping up his employees into a primal, almost subhuman frenzy. Some of the film’s best lines are found here as he exhorts his brokers to be ruthless and cutthroat.
It’s three hours long mainly because the film is more interested in Belfort’s ascent, rather than his descent. When the FBI start investigating their less-than-shady stock-trading (or, in the words of Belfort’s father, when “the chickens come home to roost”), we’ve already spent 2 hours gazing at this bombastic carnival.
This self-conscious spectacle is further heightened by frequent shatterings of the fourth wall. Jordan often addresses the camera directly, and there’s a few unsophisticated uses of voiceovers to deliver the characters’ inner monologue—perhaps these could have been eliminated. But maybe that’s the point: this world and its hyper-rich inhabitants are so self-absorbed and narcissistic, they think the voice in their head is more interesting than anything else.
Understandably, the controversy arises here—some (like scholar Phyllis Zagano) have accused Scorsese of being complicit in exalting the excesses of swindling brokers without any real moral consequences to them. But do we really need someone to tell us that Jordan Belfort’s behaviour is wrong?
Arguably, Scorsese’s unvarnished depiction of Wall Street bacchanalia is perhaps the most effective method for posing two difficult questions: How can American society allow such lives to be lived? How different are Jordan Belfort and his friends from people like you and me?
Matthew McConaughey deserves a hearty mention for his brief appearance as a high-flying broker who mentors a young Belfort while lunching at a fiftieth-floor five-star restaurant. He steals every second of this scene (which was largely improvised), setting the tone for the rest of the film with his manifesto for getting rich (at the clients’ expense) and outrageous suggestions for staying “relaxed on Wall Street”. McConaughey’s character deserves his own movie—I could have watched two more hours of that scene.
The real triumph of Wolf of Wall Street is this: its most enjoyable parts are its most immoral. And here, Scorsese channels A Clockwork Orange without the Kubrick’s irresistible gravity: why do we still watch Jordan?
There’s a scene where Belfort takes a model out to dinner. She knows he’s already married, and she coyly asks him about his real intentions. (We all know what they are.) Belfort replies with a straight face that he just wants to be friends. As she toys with her drink, she replies, “We’re not gonna be friends.”
You will either love this movie or hate it—it will be difficult to just stay friends with its amoral cast and its brazen storyline.
