Nobody shows us evil better than Scorsese
Naked greed on menu in new DiCaprio flick
Sometimes, you just want more. Drugs. Money. Sex. Chocolate. Whatever. If some is good, more has to be better. Right?
One part says yes. The other says not really, and within the gaping yawn between lies the eternal human conflict.
Thank goodness, then, for Martin Scorsese, a director who hunts down the dark strands of human weakness and turns them into a vibrant symphony of images.
His sagas of the working-class outsider find substance in ugliness. But the real drama is unfolding inside the mind, as witnessed in Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, Goodfellas and Casino, Gangs of New York and The Departed.
This time around, he goes to Wall Street, where he swings his bat at a drug-filled piñata of a stockbroker named Jordan Belfort (Leo DiCaprio). A blue-collar kid who got his start at a big firm only to be let go when the going got tough, Belfort eventually discovered the huge commissions to be made on penny stocks and turned his sights on the big fish.
He suckered old money out of millions selling garbage, and in the process, turned a bunch of Wall Street misfits into overnight millionaires. It’s a story we’ve heard before, from everyone from Oliver Stone (Wall Street) to Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room): How greed seduces people into believing a grotesque lie because we all want to get rich. And we all think we deserve it.
What makes Belfort such an interesting villain is that he was a real guy, but real people don’t function like movie characters. They don’t rush into action at the end of act two, and they rarely come up with great one-liners. Real people procrastinate and avoid conflict. They tell lies to cover their ass and they’ll typically sacrifice another’s happiness for their own.
It’s the dawn of the 1980s and Scorsese gives us close-ups of the bloody guts as Belfort disembowels one lamb after another. His mane grows puffier with each kill, but once he’s made it to the top, there’s nowhere left to go but down.
Few people can make the descent into debauchery as much fun as Scorsese. Some get waylaid by morality along the way and lose their nerve, but not Marty. He slices thick, juicy slabs of sin into this cinematic sandwich and all that grease oozes perfectly from the golden brown sides.
All that spiritual fat gets rendered into smooth, soapy moments thanks to Scorsese’s rubbernecking direction and DiCaprio’s complete surrender to the demons of temptation.
To say this movie is sexist and depraved would be too flattering. It’s entirely misogynist and unrepentantly amoral, which is why it’s so good. It shows us all the freaky goosebumps of male insecurity and has the courage to show us how weak, unattractive men use their bank account to compensate for throbbing shortcomings.
It explains the world we live in better than any Lockean or Keynesian equation as Scorsese shows us a horny, shallow, entitled megalomaniac at the wheel of the free world.
There are moments when we even like Jordan and his unabashed ego because he’s got the kind of brass nuts and bolts America loves to polish. Scorsese eventually uses that awe to great effect as he forces us to reconcile a cooked ledger. Every time we feel a tug of sympathy toward our lumbering Leo, Scorsese rattles his cage and shows us what he’s really made of: lies, cocaine, and more lies.
In many ways, this is the movie The Great Gatsby should have been as it examines America’s passionate love affair with money without a hint of sentiment. There is no romance. No feelings. There is only money and ego stripped down to the wrinkly white truth.
There’s no question it’s gross. But that why The Wolf of Wall Street’s howl proves so haunting: It snaps a selfie of society with soul juice trickling down our triple chin.