(
Spoilers throughout.)
By now you've heard about and perhaps experienced the "
hyperkinetic"
The Wolf of Wall Street. There's plenty of energy there, sure, and plenty of the traditional Scorsese sweeps, swoops, and spins, giving the film a delirious momentum that
social critics believe will turn impressionable children or morons into white-collar criminals.
They have a point. The movie doesn't have a crime-doesn't-pay message at all. The crime
does pay. What it has to say is much more chilling than that.
The movie at first seems to follow a familiar Scorsese pattern: There's a central character who's tightly bonded to family figures (blood kin or not), and he's doing something extraordinary (usually at least somewhat illegal) that can't go on forever. The formula isn't strict -- in
The Departed, for example, the hero is an undercover quasi-cop acting as a mobster, and his "family" ties are mainly professional -- but there's always a sense that the hero is obligated by something bigger than business interests, and that those ties have something to do with his fate.
In
The Wolf of Wall Street, the members of Jordan Belfort's crew aren't relatives, but they're family. When Belfort has to pick himself up off Wall Street after the crash of 1987, and decides to build an empire from penny stocks in Long Island, he chooses these guys because they have what, in his vision, it takes to build it: They're basically street hustlers who know that the answer to "sell me this pen" is to make the mark
need the pen. He doesn't mention it (though Scorsese underlines it), but they're also stupid, and that's important too.
The money starts to roll in and the family gels. The guys become fiercely loyal to Belfort and to one another -- except when they get too pissed off or fucked up; boys will be boys and, like I said, they're stupid, though increasingly rich. They enact affectionate rituals to strengthen and affirm their bonds, including nicknames, hugs, ass-pats, and declarations of bro, brah, and brother, as well as photogenic orgies.
This kind of behavior is familiar from the goombahs of previous Scorsese movies, but there's a difference in the way the bond is formed here. It isn't brought over from Sicily. It's not a bond of work or shared duty, either, exactly. It's all based on a sales pitch. Belfort builds the bond out of nothing -- a magic nothing, a line of bullshit.
Now, all the guys know about the bullshit; it's part of what makes them giddy about their success. There's an amazing early scene in which the crew, still in their garage days, watch Belfort reel in a sucker via speakerphone while pantomiming a sex act that spells out every stage of what he's doing to the mark. The guys are ecstatic, they can't stay still or shut up, they're like little kids who just learned to swear. They might be excited about making money, but they're
bananas for making it like this.
And they'll go to the wall to keep it up. Which is important, because if any of them felt he could do better and went to another firm to try this shit, that'd break the spell
real fast. Stratton Oakmont is as insular as the Cosa Nostra -- though occasionally they mob up with folks from the straight world, who will enter their world and even endure some shit to make some money.
As a reward for their loyalty, Belfort offers his family a very, very nice living: money, drugs, glamour, laughs. But --
You know, I was just about to say it's about more than money. But that isn't true. These guys just think it is.
DiCaprio is great in the title role, but great in a specific and deliberately limited way. His opening pitch is pure candy, a promise of excitement to come. He says "I love drugs" as if he's talking about rock-climbing -- he's proud of it and invites you to share this awesome high. In fact all his pitches are as good. They might not be as fresh after a while, but you still feel his excitement.
But you never learn anything about him. You don't learn about his character. What eventually becomes inescapable is that there
is no character. And if there were, Belfort wouldn't show it to you because he's pitching all the way. Every second.
I wouldn't have thought this even halfway through the movie, and it didn't completely hit me until after it was over. Because the logic of the narrative, enforced by hundreds of movies that look something like this one, put my focus on the forming of the bonds, which made me think of Belfort as a human being, a leader -- leaders are restrained, opaque, but they have to be, right? Leaders may be distant and square-jawed and steely-eyed, but that doesn't mean they're not human, right? Belfort's guys are like his platoon, his posse, his team. They come up together, I thought, and they by God go down together.
Except they don't. "I ratted them all out," Belfort tells us near the end. In Scorsese terms it's an amazingly tossed-off betrayal. It's not like Henry Hill, down to "$3200 for a lifetime... not even enough to pay for the coffin" and throwing in the towel in
Goodfellas. This is an afterthought.
Belfort was ready to rat them from day one. *
Belfort doesn't have a character, but he does have appetites. He likes all kinds of drugs, all kinds of good times, all kinds of sex; explaining his interest in the Duchess of Bay Ridge who becomes his second wife, which is intense enough that he throws his first marriage over for it, he says they share "interests," and this is illustrated by Belfort snorting coke off her tits in a limo. In another scene he acts as if he's literally abject before the Duchess' pussy. Maybe at that moment he is. But he's always got someone else. He's never without options.
One could spin one's wheels wondering why he's like this, what's missing in the guy's life that he's so limited. But who's going to care about that when there's all this sex and wealth and fun going on? Belfort's marks inside and outside Stratton Oakmont sure didn't. And neither did I while I was watching.
That's what the movie's about.
These scenes of excess dazzle, whether you find the behavior cheering or nauseating. But so do some slower scenes, in a queasier way. For example, there's the sitdown Belfort arranges with two FBI agents on his yacht -- shot simple as pie -- that shows how absolutely, self-assuredly devoted to the con he is; it's excruciating, not because you expect him to lose, but because you can't imagine the balls it would take to do this.
And there's one that does get energetic after a while, but the run-up is very patient. Belfort's gotten the word; cut a deal with the SEC, abandon the company, and everything will go easy for him. Halfway through an uncharacteristically mournful speech to a depressed staff, he suddenly tells them he'd be a hypocrite if he left, and that he's decided not to do it; he's going to stay with the company.
Now, throughout the whole trouble part of Belfort's story, you may wonder: Does he miscalculate? Maybe baiting the FBI was a bad idea. Maybe his feelings are running away with him. Maybe he isn't as much in control as he thinks. This decision to stay with Stratton -- isn't that pride taking the hero down, like in all the old stories?
That misses the point. For Belfort there may be reversals, but there's no fall. Why does he do what he does? Does Belfort have the same weakness for power that he has for pussy? As we saw with pussy, there's always an alternative. Though it seems at the time an absolutely insane idea, it turns out the (pretty soft) prison time Belfort gets for his outrageous decision isn't much more than what he could have expected if he'd played ball -- due to the trim to his sentence for ratting out his friends. A winner never quits.
When he reverses field in that meeting, no one knows this. And he does something remarkable before he reverses. (In that pantomime, this would be where he massages the clit.) He tells the room, in a heartbreaking voice, about the firm's first female broker, Kimmie Belzer, about how at the dawn of Stratton she came to him as a single mother and was desperate enough to request an advance on salary, which Belfort of course gave her with extra "because I believed in you." He tears up, she tears up, everyone tears up. And when Belfort announces his turnaround the crowd goes wild, crying, screaming, and, for an unnervingly long time, wordlessly chanting as they beat their chests like tribesmen.
For everyone in the room, this is more than the truth -- it's what they believe in. It's the heroism of daring greatly, reaching for the stars, shooting for the moon. It's about believing in oneself and believing in each other. It's personal achievement
and it's leaving no one behind. It's loyalty. It's family. It's, we all like to think, America.
It's bullshit.
When Belfort finishes his prison time, he's on the road as a sales trainer, in Auckland. He's introduced to an audience by a sleazy MC as a "motherfucker," which is supposed to be a compliment. We only see the start of Belfort's pitch. His face is a mask; lighting emphasizes DiCaprio's slit-like eyes and mouth. He comes into the audience and confronts individual members with the "sell me this pen" trick we saw him use on his original crew. The audience, it appears, is largely comprised of South Asian immigrants who watch Belfort anxiously. The dream he's selling has made it all the way to the other side of the world.
This is where we came in.
Every craft aspect is first-rate, including Scorsese's taste in music, especially "Cast My Fate to the Wind." Jonah Hill does the Scorsese motormouth as well as anyone. Margot Robbie is perfectly vacuous as the Duchess, and thus a perfect foil for Belfort. Kudos to Bob Shaw, Chris Shriver, and Ellen Christiansen who give us bad taste without taking easy shots at the era because 1.) that's harder and 2.) taste this bad is timeless. And Thelma Schoonmaker should be on Mount Rushmore.
*(If you've seen the movie, you may be wondering: What about the note he passes Donnie in the sushi restaurant? I think it just wasn't time for Belfort to pull the trigger yet. Early in the movie Belfort tells the crew: first one to talk loses. Short cons are good but long cons keep your options open.)
