Hold My Liquor: The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

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Dir. Martin Scorsese

Let's push aside the idea of this being a true story. It's based on the autobiography of Jordan Belfort, played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the film, a man who through his success and illegal activities in the penny stock market led a life of debauchery with his employees until the FBI caught wind of him. But it's to the point now the biography in cinema as a beacon of truth has become a faded ideal. The films themselves have dramatic license more than "truth", thus making the notion of "truth" a subjective issue. American Hustle (2013) starts with questioning the factual truth in a caption. Pain & Gain (2013) has to state at one point something gruesome actually happened in the real events, but changed content elsewhere to the point there are potential moral implications that have troubled many. Notice the common trend between the films mentioned too. The Wolf of Wall Street about one man's rise and fall in wealth. American Hustle about con men. Pain & Gain about body builders who stole a man's entire wealth. Add The Bling Ring (2013), another true story about girls and one boy robbing celebrities' homes, and Spring Breakers (2012), not a true story, about girls wanting spring break forever even if through Uzis. If you go past cinema, you could add Kanye West's Yeezus, which contains aspects of the complications of wealth, and the despair it causes, as well as the exhilaration, especially with the song New Slaves. All about people who desire to be someone else, or have already gotten to the peak of wealth and looking at the tremor in their hands. It doesn't require a PHD in Sociology to realise, after the global economic issues within these many years, that these American works released within the same year or so are all mapping together a consciousness of what it means to be have a life in the USA. Living in Britain, they map out how the concept of wealth or grandeur are fleeting desires that may not be worth the pleasure they give.

If there is one benefit to this film, it's that a very adult film, both in its inherent subject as well as content, at three hours long and no sense of pandering to a middle taste is able to be seen on a cold January day in a multiplex. Completely bolted to the seat for all the narrative, but also leading to the sense of actually feeling the elevation and drastic, numbing fall Belfort enters physically, your endurance felt in registering all the sound and visual information Scorsese wants to show you. While clearly from the same page of Goodfellas (1990) and Casino (1995), this film exists in a different context. The same playfulness with visuals, monologues etc., alongside the eclectic use of music, is here like in those films, but Belfort's story is a different moral issue. His is not a world of mobsters and actual violence. His is of cheating the stock market and self implosion through Quaaludes and lack of responsibility for his actions. We except mobsters to be corrupt and violent, but even now it would be shocking to actually know what a stock broker could get up to. It's even more shocking now in a politically correct time, as Belford has extra curricula activities including paid hookers and "dwarf tossing" to reward his financial army of testosterone with. Moments in the film, even if they were hilarious, as much a masterpiece as a comedy as well as a horror, left me grimacing at the same time. The film has become controversial in how Scorsese never openly damns the life of Belford and his colleagues had. I admit, despite the obvious grotesque nature of it, that the exhilaration felt, the energy shown in the film techniques used, pleasure for pleasure's sake, constant sex and wanton destruction, had an effect on me I will not try to hide or deny. There is the sense of a central banquet sequence of a rich landlord in Satyricon by Gaius Petronius, the remaining fragment of a Roman work of a vast length, adapted into a 1969 film by Federico Fellini, in how the debauchery is both gruesome but pleasurable within it. There are Bacchus levels of lunacy in the film, which Belford references, but there is something clearly amiss or horrifying too even when you laugh and find Belford, thanks to DiCaprio's tremendous performance, charismatic. His complete disregard for women, especially when he doesn't get his way, is a paradox in that there are women in the wolf pack of his business who are just as abrasive as his prostitute shagging, cocaine breathing alpha males, but his treatment of his first wife and second wife Naomi Lapaglia (Margot Robbie) is that of a child with a violent streak hidden in him. The eventual comedown, the cold turkey, after two hours when Belford falls feels like an abrupt, cold change of the tone from before, when you feel mental pain at how everything has stopped completely in his world for the last hour on. The greatest virtue of the film is that Scorsese doesn't need to wag his finger at his viewers about this content. Success to him is both an adrenaline but it ends with misery, all without a direct lecture. He cuts to incredibly grim moments in the debauchery from the beginning, only to go back to the debauchery. The funniest sequences in a film where the actors were allowed to improvise, incredible performances all round with Jonah Hill being a perfect foil to DiCaprio, actually have in inherent darkness to them in their implications.

Such as the scene where Belford has consumed so many Quaaludes, a banned sleep aid held like rare diamonds for him and his second-in-command Donnie Azoff (Hill), that he has regressed physically to a sponge wriggling forwards on the floor, making the concept of getting down stairs, let alone drive his car back home quickly, an impossible task. Incredible for DiCaprio's comedic ability and Scorsese's subtle use of the visuals alongside the editing of Thelma Schoonmaker, it also sets up the discomforting fact that, unlike the rituals of Bacchus that, for their destructive frenzy, were a celebration of life, Belford and his lackeys are celebrating suicidal self-destruction instead by letting events like this happen to them. By this point in the narrative the FBI and an agent within it (Kyle Chandler) are closing in on Belford, but he already looks like a person liable to destroy himself with drink and substances with incidents like this. This willingness to close in on an overdose, physical harm or harm of others, with being a married man with children at that point, makes the illicit pleasures shown reveal their truly disturbing side.  

The question that has to be asked is whether The Wolf of Wall Street is actually a great film. The issue of how a film can change on a second viewing is significant for me. But I cannot just watch a film immediately like others could - I need to digest them, even if it takes a year, before doing so again. In context of a single viewing, as a first exposure to this material, isolated by itself without the issue of rewatches, it succeeds very well. It is not a biography to me, but more of a study of how the desire for more and more is a trait that can exist in all people, that we can all disregard any responsibilities for disregard for itself to be the main drug of choice. Belford succeeds in the penny stock market, the bottom of the barrel, so anyone could turn into this version of him in real life in any area where pay or promotions are available. Azoff says at one point that trashing his body after a night's debauchery is what he enjoys in life, and the desire for money is only to make this possible, a concept inevitable to collapse. As the farce of Belford trying to cover up his crimes leads to even Mother Nature knocking him down (literally), the sense that his recklessness is as much a self-conscious need to potentially kill himself. By the end the only difference is that he's going to be respectable but not change at all his mentality of the past from wisdom. All the films (and album) I've referenced in this review have a close connection to this ideal too. The real life Bling Ring became too confident, boasting of their riches and painting a bulls eye on their back through Facebook and gossip. American Hustle shows that even a FBI agent can fail to realise that glory is a self-harming thing he won't get in the first place. Spring Breakers shows a potential "happy" ending, but it's going to be one of a violent videogame that will require continuous gun use. Yeezus the album, a prescient work for the year of 2013 too, is how the desire to have more and more is as much a desire at destroying everything for destruction's sake. The only exception is Mark Wahlberg's character in Pain & Gain, who is content with the one crime, but is dragged back into another by his fellow accomplishes who want to continue despite being, for a lack of a polite choice of words, brain-dead fuck-ups. The issue of whether Scorsese's film adds anything of worth is in that, as a veteran artist of over five decades over everyone who made the mentioned work, he is able to draw from himself and his own cinematic knowledge to fully explore his character of Jordan Belfort.

As someone exceptionally disappointed in the last two feature films of his, its elevating to see a film that will add to the complex structure of Scorsese's final filmography when it arrives one day. News, especially from a letter to his daughter that was translated to hypertext online, suggests he is considering retirement, but I hope that he will make a few more films before this day comes. For the potential of The Wolf of Wall Street to become slight over a few viewings, it's a potential shift to a piss-and-vinegar version of him who made After Hours (1985) and Bringing Out The Dead (1999). No desire for stating obvious morals bur pressing the viewer to make their own decisions. Rejecting the average mellowness of the last two films before this one for growing wiser through vulgarity, bad taste and cramming as many techniques he picked up over the years into films as he can. This is if he works with how this film has opened him up in his filmmaking again.