By Michael Scoular (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: January 8, 2014
“We’re face to face with images all the time in a way that we never have been before. And that’s why I believe we need to stress visual literacy… we need to educate [people] to understand the difference between moving images that engage their humanity and their intelligence, and moving images that are just selling them something.”
– Martin Scorsese, writing in the New York Review of Books August 15, 2013 issue
“Whip their necks off, don’t let ‘em off the phone.”
– Jordan Belfort’s motto, quoted in Forbes article “Former meat broker Jordan Belfort now pushes dicey stocks”
More than once in The Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) breaks from his heedless, controlling voiceover to acknowledge, briefly coming up for air, that he is aware there are other people in the world outside his head, and that he thinks they are, in one way or another, fools. And he loves them for it. Following the lead set by a mentor (Matthew McConaughy), who in a single lunch scene dazzles and demystifies his entire world, at one point comparing, in an attractively wise way, the ephemeral code of the stock exchange with the actual cash brokers can pocket, Belfort breaks from analysis or explanation of IPOs and investment strategies to say some variation on “you have no idea what I’m talking about, but none of that really matters. What matters is that” either “it was fucking illegal” or “we were making a fucking lot of money.”
A number of Scorsese’s movies thrive, in part, by their necessary incoherance. Not only do they open with detailed entrances into complicated, sealed-off worlds (Casino, with its similar emphasis on “keeping people playing” a loser’s game, is only one of several earlier Scorsese films that expands and echoes within his latest) where names, numbers, and definitions emerge amid thrilling and/or garish displays of human extremes, but Scorsese also folds in multiple narrators, fades and mixes of fitting or offbeat song selections, and digressions into the past.
The Wolf of Wall Street is simpler on one count: Belfort commands attention as a guide through his own life, not just narrating but exciting himself through the act of reliving his ascendancy. By the time we’ve caught up to him though, as the head of a frat-house cult-floor of stock-sellers, there’s reason not to trust Belfort’s explanation, whatever it would be, of his business and pleasure. DiCaprio’s charisma, following his acts in Django Unchained and The Great Gatsby like a connected trail of lit fuses, doesn’t seek to impress but intimidates his audience with words that code as undeniable humanity. He writes a script, attracts a following, and “knows how to spend [money] better” than his clients do.
Despite the movie’s three-hour running time, Scorsese has focused this toward something, partly involving giving his source material, Belfort’s memoir, enough rope to hang the system that enables it. Forced to consult the classifieds after losing a job, Belfort lands at the type of business that usually leaves a “for lease” sign within a year, selling penny stocks to people with lottery desires. From here, an established order is set: people either find a common purpose with Belfort’s artillery of sales tactics or get talked into submission. Scorsese’s approach is the exact opposite: while he may be a character that deserves nothing but contempt, that scene with McConaughy shows a person not terribly unlike the victims that end up as voices at the ends of telephones. He favours water for lunch hour, not martinis, defers on a snort of coke, and genuinely believes his job is to bring about the fiduciary benefit of the people whose trust he has been offered. This doesn’t absolve him, but it does make The Wolf of Wall Street about more than just a rich, ugly person’s plentiful choice of drugs and sex.
Scorsese could be, and has been, accused of making the violent, exploitive people he depicts too attractive. There is a point to be made that, while the movie’s diversity of tones struck by its many scenes are a virtue, there are some that do not work very well, hedging closer to Belfort’s leering voice when it’s already been well-established. But what Scorsese is capturing, and what makes The Wolf of Wall Street a difficult film to watch at times, is the rise of an actor, performing to larger and larger crowds until, well, he ends up on a screen. And he’s good. It’s one thing to see Belfort win over his audiences within the film through misreadings of Moby Dick and of a Forbes article intended as a takedown, and it’s another to see him work a script, Scorsese’s and Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing choices and DiCaprio’s overworked line readings and mock gestures turning him into a screwball phone savant. What he’s doing is horrible, but it’s a funny talent to see at work.
And Scorsese shows both sides, observing the rise of someone able to “get ahead in the world,” and what enables him to get there. There is no ambivalent character onscreen as a “way in” and Scorsese doesn’t present this from the remove of journalism. A few times, the picture breaks into commercials made for Belfort’s enterprises, made with the interpolated lines and different aspect ratio of ‘90s video. It mimics, in the way that Belfort is able to mimic believability when he needs to, an acceptable form of sales, only for Scorsese to then, in one instance, blur between what is fact, artifice, and advertisement, by letting the camera roll on, as if to produce an image of justice with the knowledge such a thing is completely inadequate.
The Wolf of Wall Street is 179 minutes, probably cannot be completely recalled and made sense of in one viewing, and cannot be relegated to either the pole of condoning debauchery or didacticism against it — it’s a clear vision of a warped point of view from a director whose body of work continues to explore the space between moral guilt and social ecstasy.
