The film begins with Jordan Belfort, the eponymous wolf, tossing a midget against a velcro dart board in a fit of hysterical office hijinks. It is, figuratively and literally, the predator hunting the prey, the big man picking on the little guy.
The Wolf of Wall Street is loud, bombastic, egotistical, and ultimately, boring. Scorsese paints a three-hour epic that doesn’t bring anything new to the table. We’ve seen this biographical trajectory before: the wide-eyed, naive young man is slowly seduced by a world of shady morality, greed, money, women, and drugs. This is an excessive film about excesses, an aggressive story told at the same unrelenting pitch that it can’t build to any possible climax. Constant chaos is not a very effective dramatic mode.
Scorsese has arguably made a career examining the alpha-male ego. His dissection of the male psyche in Casino and The Departed and Goodfellas hinges on its male leads’ desires for some type of higher truth than they currently know; they are admirable, to one extent or another, in their quest for security or love or righteousness. In Wolf, Scorsese again continues this worship of masculine dominance, except pitched to an extreme high, as if he believes impassivity to be synonymous with impotence. And in Scorsese’s world, nothing is worse than an impotent man.
But does Scorsese really think turning up the volume on the same ideas repeatedly translates to effective storytelling? In between the numerous scenes of raucous yelling and incessant indulgences, I couldn’t help but feel bored by the displays of gaudy male vanity. Where was Belfort's illumination? His self-awareness? His humanity?
The film depicts Belfort as an amoral hound, a callous, hedonistic predator who preys on others only to turn a quick profit. Belfort lacks the markings of any real person; he lacks complexity, contradiction, and insight. Ultimately, he lacks intrigue. He is lifted to the same deafening roar of cynicism and selfishness for three hours. It should offer plenty of time for Scorsese to reveal a change in Belfort’s journey; but revelation never comes. So what happens in a story with such shapeless, aimless energy? The undifferentiated mess on screen strains my capacity to enjoy, much less care.
It’s no coincidence that the film’s two strongest scenes feature Belfort as his quietest. The first is when Belfort first begins at his brokerage job, being sold by the firm’s top broker (played to great effectiveness by a sleazy but irresistible Matthew McConaughey). Holding up a vial of cocaine and thumping his chest, McConaughey sells Belfort not just the job, but the lifestyle: Never work for others; always work for yourself; take the money that’s owed to you. Belfort barely speaks; he simply laps it up, seduced by the lifestyle at his fingertips. It’s the only moment in the film that we see Belfort internalizing any type of emotion or thought beyond “Where are the luuuudes?!”
The second great scene is a tense confrontation between Belfort and straight-laced FBI agent, Patrick Denham, on Belfort’s yacht. Denham represents the law, the sanity, and the moral decency in an indecent world. Belfort sees him as nothing more than a failure who has to ride the subway everyday. The brilliance of the scene lies in something the rest of the film eschews: undertones. As Belfort and Denham size each other up, trading faux flattery as much as veiled insults, you get the sense that these two men are goliaths in their respective fields; neither will acquiesce quickly. Neither will succeed easily.
It’s a shame I didn’t find myself enjoying Wolf as a modern tale of American hubris (or is it success?). To a great extent, I was reminded of Fincher’s handling of similar themes in The Social Network. Belfort rises to money and power by cheating and lying and picking on the little guy; Zuckerberg seeks power through a more universally relatable feeling: loneliness. But it's not loneliness for its own sake; it's loneliness as a driver for greater motivations -- the prestige of Harvard; the respect of Silicon Valley; or even, it seems, world domination. Zuckerberg's journey carries with it the stuff of great storytelling: intrigue, doubts, contradiction, perspective. In fact, the entire dramatic conflict of The Social Network revolves around Zuckerberg’s alleged lies; his words and actions carry real repercussions as ex-friends and enemies now seek retribution. Belfort’s lies only seem to lead to more Quaaludes. It’s a distinctly unsubtle, uncomplicated, and uninteresting mode of storytelling.
Upon the 1992 release of Glengarry Glen Ross -- a film which at the time, uttered the most number of “fucks” in movie history -- Roger Ebert questioned how language, and to a greater extent, the contents of a film, revealed the purpose of storytelling:
Villains have always been the most valuable stock in fiction… What do we "learn" from these vile characters? Nothing, maybe; perhaps we just enjoy exorcising our fears at one remove, by witnessing their defeats… The most fundamental mistake you can make with any piece of fiction is to confuse the content with the subject. The content is what is in a movie. The subject is what the movie is about. [Some people] are as offended by a Martin Scorsese picture as by a brainless violent action picture, because they see the same elements in both. But the brainless picture is simply a form of exhibitionism, in which the director is showing you disgusting things on the screen. And the Scorsese picture might be an attempt to deal seriously with guilt and sin, with evil and the possibility of redemption.
It’s a pity Ebert didn’t get a chance to see Wolf. I'm curious how he would revise his take on Scorsese now.
