'The Wolf of Wall Street'

Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street is the latest contradiction to his earlier statement that he would never make another gangster film again. Scorsese then makes the oh-so-witty observation that the real crooks can be found on Wall Street in the form of stockbrokers.

Cue Jordan Belfort, main character and overall prick, and his half-wit, incestuous (alright, that was funny) beta-wingman Donnie Azorff. We follow Belfort through the excruciating first year of employment only for him to get fired on the very day of his first real job. Disgruntled, Belfort ends up in New Jersey where he quickly becomes savvy in the pump-and-dump scamming system in which naïve postmen, always postmen, are relived of their life savings by having them invest in so-called penny stocks of companies that, more often than not, do not exist. Of course, he makes money, subsequently switches his first wife for a glitzier version, buys a mansion, a yacht, some monkeys, cars, while having a rather extreme appetite for hookers, cocaine, Quaaludes: you name it, he takes it. Of course, the FBI soon starts paying closer attention and things slowly but surely unravel. Sound familiar? That’s because it is! We have seen this film in one form or another a thousand times. It is a self-indulgent, occasionally witty, highly over-the-top melodrama about … erm … I dunno … money?

The only difference to the admittedly rather conventional Wall street drama is that Scorsese does not abandon his fascination with the small-time criminal and don’t get me wrong, apart from their excessive wealth, these are essentially crooks. The Stratton-Oakmont office doesn’t look any better than the garage out of which they operate at first, only better lit. These characters never evolve, the hookers are getting more expensive, the food is eaten on a yacht, the drugs get more exclusive, but, in the end, these are excessively masturbating, vulgar, immature adolescents, living each day as if Mummy and Daddy are trying to relive their honeymoon on Barbados for the weekend, leaving the boys in charge of the family home. In its fascination with the small-timers of the demimonde, The Wolf of Wall Street shows clear parallels to Goodfellas or even Casino. It does lack the anxiety and underlying concept of danger of the former Scorsesean masterpieces. It mostly resembles the attempts of third-year film students having seen Goodfellas way too many times. The resemblance to Scorsese’s earlier work remains thus mostly structural in his use of voice-over, sleek visuals and in the all-male relationships as only bases of validation and authenticity.

The actors are really let off the leash in terms of performative freedom. DiCaprio gives a performance that is riveting in its very physicality. After a couple of hours, however, the burly extravagance becomes not so much powerful as annoying. Belfort as a character has no room for subtlety and DiCaprio’s performance is almost equal to his latest rendition of Jay Gatsby. He seems to be drawn to playing wealthy, all-powerful alpha males who get what they want through sheer persistence and charisma. Jonah Hill can be seen as the new Joe Pesci, though without the latters rage and violence. He does provide comic relief, though, in his downright silliness. His performance, to me, felt somehow more complete and honest in that he manages to convey the very pleasure of playing an immature, loud and crass scumbag. The only performance that really stands out is Kyle Chandler’s portrayal of Agent Patrick Dunham. Thus, the play-off between Belfort and Dunham relays the only real illustration of power relations between similar characters on different sides and all the connotative subtleties in dialogue that we have come to expect in a Scorsese film. I had some hope for the character of Aunt Emma, played by Joanna Lumley, but she is never given the screen time to fully develop her potential. Same goes for Matthew McConaughey, who nevertheless delivers one of the funniest monologues of the film.

Rather than Belfort, money is the real protagonist of this three-hour joyride: Money as temptation, money as abstraction, money as aphrodisiac, money as self-validation, money as doctrine. But, first and foremost: money in all its omni-presence as the base of our society in its very essence and the underlying power structures it fuels. Scorsese has never lain off the mantle of Catholicism and here; the new religion is called capitalism. Again, nothing new. The film not so much works through deconstruction in that underlying societal structures are embedded in the narrative for the spectator to decipher as by blatant superficiality. Here, money is not ideological; ideology has itself been replaced with money. Money is not a means to an end; it is the means and the end. Money is its own goal, where goods purchased are less important than abstract possession of capital.

We are sucked into this dizzying spiral of images in which any notion of contemplation becomes impossible. Here, the film clearly mirrors the hysteric tendencies of our own post-capitalist society in which success is equaled with wealth and sexuality becomes an economic principle in that it can be bought or is treated as the remnant of an inherent power relation that again draws on money and who has it, quote: “You have my money taped to your boobs. I think you work for me”. Time in this equation is compressed and accelerated; we are taken on a ride in the fast lane to insanity. The characters are driven to a schizophrenic frenzy in which subjectivity is forever propelled forwards to an ever greater accumulation of wealth as only self-validation. Here, the notion of hysteria, for once, applies to masculinity. Even though women also fall prey to the power relation of money, they do so either as wives and trophies, consumable objects, or have to adopt a typically ‘male’ behaviour in order to succeed and survive in this environment.

The mise-en-scène mirrors this sense of dizzying void and glitzy surface. The many slow motions and freeze frames convey a sense of staggering artificiality that perfectly suits the contextual abstraction that is this lifestyle. Terence Winter once again demonstrates his penchant for the glitzy nothingness of a world that exists as pure surface, as he has already proven in Boardwalk Empire. From the very start, the film is driven by excess and gluttony as a direct consequence of extreme capitalism. This excess is also conveyed through the sheer abundance of the word fuck in the dialogues (apparently over 500 fucks), the use of hyperbolic language and superlatives again highlights the lack of meaning, content and depth of this world, our times and, ultimately, the film.

The imagery is clearly carnivalesque in that the bodies that people the screen become grotesque to the extreme. DiCaprio, in the throes of a drug-related full-body paralysis, becomes almost animalistic in gestures that befit a contortionist. In this sense, the film regurgitates the stylistic conventions of a turn of the century vaudeville roadshow as we witness little people, women that are compared to witches with half-shaven heads, marching bands, monkeys and, of course, the female body as the eternal spectacle. The visuals, as the events and lives depicted, are but a hallucination: any notion of identity or subjectivity is displaced to a diffusive circumvolution of spectacular masks, misapprehensions, delusions, performances and uncanny mimetic misrepresentations. Remember the Popeye-scene? –There you go!

The protagonists as such become vessels for the destitute, wacky hollowness that pervades all aspects of the film. Spectatorial immersion proves impossible, as the viewer’s gaze slides off the glitzy surface of the visuals. I did not care for Belfort or any of the other characters for that matter. The characters are but elements in this side show of freakishness and the carousel of madness that is the narrative. Here, however, lies the film’s strongest element in that the narrative and mise-en-scène is fueled by a crazy energy that does not fail to captivate, even if limited to mere visual thrills and spectacle.

The film uncannily reminds us that in watching, we, too, become consumers of a product, but instead of feeding us hidden depths, Scorsese presents us with a grotesque imitation of our own desire to consume. The voice-over is by now a constant tool in Scorsese’s cinematic workbench. Nevertheless, it does not serve the furthering or framing of an individual narrative as it provokes an uneasy feeling of direct implication on the spectator’s side whom Belfort addresses directly on numerous occasions. At the same time, we are the dunces, the small-time consumers and when Belfort sneers that we wouldn’t understand the intricacies of his scams and we wouldn’t be interested in them anyways, we are reminded that, indeed, we are sitting here and, indeed, have paid for the spectacle of it all. And pure spectacle is what we get. The little man, here taken literally at times, is always the one to get fucked and why should someone like Belfort assume responsibility for a flawed system incorporating ideals to which we all aspire? The notion of responsibility becomes a parody as the lads discuss the health and safety risks of their scheme to play human darts with a little man (even though the real-life Belfort claims this never has, but could just as easily have, happened). One has to applaud Scorsese for the non-resolution and thematic constancy of his ending that negates any moral redemption or punishment. The immediacy of this late modern experience, the representation of desire as instant gratification and the absolute non-essence of existence in the universe of Wall Street (and the cinema of attraction for that matter) render any concept of personal or human responsibility futile.

The Wolf of Wall Street is clearly in love with its own visuals, witticisms, speed and shallowness and, to a certain extent, it works. We are sucked into the spiraling void that is this film as if helpless to face the dizzying velocity of the mise-en-scène that develops an extreme momentum. The issue of the film’s structure lies in its inconsistency. At full speed from the go, the film never reaches a peak and pure excess, even with such an experienced and skilled filmmaker as Scorsese, eventually results in boredom. After the fiftieth motivational speech given by Belfort to a hooting crowd of hormonal workers, I just did not care anymore. The stupidity of the characters and, occasionally, the script eventually overtakes the vehemence and spectacular pleasure in the skillful artificiality of the mise-en-scène. The notion of pure excess, visually and thematically, which worked so well in other films embracing the concept of pure surface (as for example, Spring Breakers), here proves flat and stale, while the performances could be expected of circus clowns in a village vaudeville. I wanted to like the film, I even loved The Departed which so many people abhorred, but here, Scorsese has lost me. It is not so much that I despise the film; I got some enjoyment from it. Nevertheless, what I can’t forgive is that, in the end, it remains utterly forgettable and this is not something I thought I would ever say of a Scorsese film.