24 December 2013
DiCaprio Stars in Scorsese’s ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’
Future archaeologists, digging through the digital and physical rubble of our long-gone civilization in search of reasons for its collapse, will be greatly helped if they unearth a file containing “The Wolf of Wall Street,” Martin Scorsese’s three-hour bacchanal of sex, drugs and conspicuous consumption. Then as now, the movie is likely to be the subject of intense scholarly debate: Does it offer a sustained and compelling diagnosis of the terminal pathology that afflicts us, or is it an especially florid symptom of the disease?
From its opening sequence — a quick, nasty, unapologetic tour through its main character’s vices and compulsions, during which he crash-lands a helicopter on the grounds of his Long Island estate and (not simultaneously) shares cocaine with a call girl in an anatomically creative manner — to its raw, chaotic finish, “The Wolf of Wall Street” hums with vulgar, voyeuristic energy. It has been a while since Mr. Scorsese has thrown himself into filmmaking with this kind of exuberance. “Goodfellas,” a sprawling inquiry into how some men do business, is an obvious precedent, and so is “Mean Streets,” an intensive study of how some men get into trouble. Even the occasional lapses of filmmaking technique (scenes that drag on too long, shots that don’t match, noticeable continuity glitches) feel like signs of life. This movie may tire you out with its hammering, swaggering excess, but it is never less than wide-awake.
At the center of the whirlwind is Jordan Belfort, a crooked stock trader played by Leonardo DiCaprio, who has recently become the handsome cinematic face of extreme capitalism. “The Great Gatsby“ (this year’s other major motion picture about a rich criminal with a mansion on Long Island) gave Mr. DiCaprio a chance to explore the romantic side of wealth. Playing a plantation owner in “Django Unchained,” he savored the sulfurous corruption of an older ruling class. As Jordan (a real person whose memoir is the source of Terence Winter’s screenplay), he achieves a kind of superhuman shallowness. Jordan is forthright about the ecstasies of money — the pills, women, cars and other toys it allows him to buy, and above all the pure dopamine rush of acquiring more — and indifferent to anything else. Gordon Gekko, the lizard of “Wall Street,” proclaimed that greed is good. That sentiment is far too lofty for Jordan. What matters to him is that greed is fun.
Mr. Belfort’s book is more boast than confession, and Mr. Winter (whose television credits include “The Sopranos” and “Boardwalk Empire”) declines to treat his rise and fall as a fable of redemption. As portrayed in the movie, Jordan Belfort is a thoroughly despicable human being, but one whose charm — the ineradicable trace of melancholy furrowing Mr. DiCaprio’s brow, the still-boyish openness of his smile — makes actively despising him almost impossible.
After meeting Jordan at his saturnalian peak, we flash back to his beginnings as an eager newbie at a reputable firm, where he is introduced to the mysteries and pleasures of the trade by a gleefully Mephistophelean Matthew McConaughey. This is less a fall from grace than a rite of passage, and after the crash of 1987 flushes Jordan out of the real Wall Street, he finds a way to recreate its worst and most attractive aspects. Taking inspiration from a storefront penny-stock outfit, he conjures up a high-profile company with the fake blue-blood name of Stratton Oakmont.
As my colleague Joe Nocera has recently pointed out, the misdeeds of Stratton Oakmont — a relatively straightforward pump-and-dump scam built on the temporarily inflated value of often worthless stocks — have little in common with the elaborate, as yet mostly unpunished, schemes that wrecked the economy a decade after Jordan Belfort’s downfall. The sums that Jordan and his pals rake in may be huge, and their methods unsavory, but they are small-timers operating on the fringes of real power and attracting the attention of law enforcement (embodied by Kyle Chandler, playing a meager hand as well as he can). The big fish, still swimming freely, can be found in “Inside Job,” Charles Ferguson’s magnificent, indignant documentary on the origins of the financial crises, or in J. C. Chandor’s “Margin Call.”
