Nobody films clouds of cocaine in slow motion like Martin Scorsese. Whether it’s the blizzard of blow in GoodFellas, or the handfuls of nose candy thrown about by Jack Nicholson in The Departed, or the snowy precipitation of his latest film, The Wolf of Wall Street. The Oscar forecast is 50/50 for Leo DiCaprio’s role as wildman stockbroker Jordan Belfort, but the snow forecast is 100 percent in Scorsese’s dark comedy.
Other drugs are prominently featured (Quaaludes come in a close second) and the nude body count is higher than in any previous Marty outing. (Best to see it in the R-18 uncut version, because otherwise, really, what’s the point?)
Is Marty becoming the D.O.M. that Kubrick did at the end, populating his wide-angle frame with naked women just because, hey, he wants to look at naked women? Possibly. But the nudity here usually serves the plot, or at least adds to the atmosphere of decadence and excess. Full frontal, hookers and honeys populate Scorsese’s trading landscape — and dwarves too, being thrown at bull’s-eye targets by coked-up brokers. And we thought the most humiliating thing little people could be hired to do was oil wrestle at Ringside Bar.
You can call The Wolf of Wall Street a comedy because, unlike GoodFellas or Casino — the two Marty films it most stylistically resembles — nobody gets killed. No dead bodies end up rotating in garbage trucks. Nobody gets beaten to a pulp with a baseball bat.
Instead, we have DiCaprio playing yet another confidence man, the kind of guy who could sell hot pizza slices at the Australian Open. He starts out cold-calling on Wall Street until the Black Monday market crash closes down his firm; he starts up all over again selling penny stocks for no-hope companies that offer higher commissions (up to 50 percent) to brokers. So Jordan uses his razor-sharp skills to train an army of voracious salesmen — people who won’t take no for an answer, preying on people’s greed and their willingness to part with a few thousand bucks on stocks that are going nowhere. Because, as stock guru Matthew McConaughey explains in the opening scene, all you have to do is get the suckers to keep buying the next stock, and never cash in; that way the brokers can amass endless commissions.
Among Jordan’s recruits is Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill), a yuppie wannabe with “phosphorescent teeth†who provides much of the comic relief in The Wolf of Wall Street. Actually, that’s not true, because everyone here — including DiCaprio who won a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Comedy — does some fine comedic work, even worthy of Jim Carrey in a scene where, wasted on Quaaludes, he tries to drag his limp body into a Ferrari and navigate himself home. If comic hilarity can be built up to the heart-hammering levels of Casino or GoodFellas, then Scorsese has achieved it, especially in the ensuing scene in which a severely ‘luded Belfort “races†to remove the phone from the hands of an equally impaired Donnie before the Feds can finish gathering wiretap evidence.
Actually, all this drug stuff is funny in the way Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was funny — or Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke. You find yourself laughing at the severely drug-impaired, not with them. If anything, it’s a very effective “just say no†message.
But it’s also Scorsese taking a fond look back at a time — the late ‘80s — when he reportedly ingested most of the drugs shown in the movie. He may depict drugs as the thing that undoes most of his anti-heroes — see Henry Hill in GoodFellas, or Nicholson in The Departed — but he sure films those drugs in loving detail. And while Quaaludes, crack, morphine and others are shown to be evil, evil substances, cocaine emerges relatively unscathed: it’s the perky upper of the go-go ‘80s.
This, and the casual female nudity (let’s go ahead and call it sexist) that abounds in The Wolf of Wall Street have led to tut-tutting from those who deplore the “morals†of Scorsese’s latest opus. Well, it was scripted by Terence Winter, the Sopranos writer who is no stranger to moral ambiguity. And by many accounts, it only scratches the surface of the drugs, hookers and excess culture that fueled the subprime market collapse of 2007. But Scorsese prefers to focus on the robbing hoods: you never see the victims of these scam artists, or the misery their schemes result in; go to Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, or Inside Job, for a better look at that. (And let’s not forget: even though Stone’s movie had an obvious moral message — greed isn’t good, ultimately — most young men who saw it immediately wanted to become Gordon Gekko.)
Those who fail to see any morality at play here don’t really understand Scorsese or his work. Of course the filmmaker likes to depict the heights of excess; that’s his favorite key. But, as in GoodFellas, Casino and Raging Bull, it’s the fall from Olympian heights that provides the ultimate tragedy. Or in this case, the dark comedy. Like Henry Hill, Ray Liotta’s gangster-turned-rat in GoodFellas, Jordan delivers his self-verdict directly to the camera. But while Hill’s tragic fall was having to give up the “good life†to become a “nobody†like everybody else (under witness protection), Belfort simply puts an upbeat spin on things: even after jail time, he still does what he does best — selling people things — albeit in a much diminished capacity, running low-rent training seminars in New Zealand.
At three hours, The Wolf of Wall Street could have used some pruning, but it shows Scorsese to be as much a filmmaking and storytelling virtuoso as ever. It’s an instant classic, with scenes that will be quoted again and again, much like the Joe Pesci-Ray Liotta exchange in GoodFellas. And yes, DiCaprio does deliver, abandoning his fake Gatsby grin and offering up yet another portrait of a nervy, pumped-up alpha male, one with a few screws loose, one who gets the girl (comely Australian newcomer Margot Robbie) then loses everything. Watch him work the room with a microphone, leading his Stratton Oakmont pack in another round of grab and take. He’s no hero, striding the decks of the Titanic, but in Scorsese’s gallery of testosterone-heavy anti-heroes, he’s definitely a permanent fixture.