McConaugheMay Day 18: The Wolf of Wall Street
One of the most formative movie-watching experience in my life was seeing this in college with a group of other kids and feeling like it was an incredible movie about one of the worst people I’d ever seen. It felt like a horror movie. I felt nauseated at the excess and the empty bacchanalia. Yes there was an allure to it, but how could anyone not see a vision of hell in this? I laughed at the drug trip scene because it was funny but really thinking about him as a father tormenting his first wife, his second wife, his kids, his father, and his friends with his behavior, it was disturbing. So many scenes end with a character, usually Belfort, looking out off-camera thinking of how unsatisfying the previous scene’s party was. There’s only one scene where a woman enjoys sex onscreen and it’s explicitly when she’s actively mocking Belfort for thinking he could ever get her off sincerely. The characters are visibly, actively unhappy, spiritually sick, thinking they cracked the code on how to get rich in America when all they did was let go of the morals that might keep them from it. It’s an open secret how to get rich: you just have to care more about yourself than you do anyone else, and behind all the sex and drugs and wealth is the message that the prize isn’t really worth the spiritual sickness it takes to get it.
I walked out of the movie and one guy (a soon-to-declare business major who’d soon get super drunk in someone’s room and slap me before getting scared I might hit him back) said that was his dream job. Some people are just sick, I don’t know what to say.
Martin Scorsese is a director who has a very good claim to being the greatest film director in American history, and he’s been lucky (and talented) enough to stay sharp as he ages. There aren’t many directors whose late-career efforts could have any sort of a reasonable claim at being their best work, but you could make a strong case for The Wolf of Wall Street being one of his best. As always, his longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker is a huge part of why his films work; despite being nearly three hours long, the movie flies by like a cocaine bender, incessantly watchable even as Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) reveals himself as a monster. Jonah Hill offers one of the finest ever portrayals of a sycophantic little gremlin, just as cruel and horny as Jordan but without the natural charisma and beauty that comes so easily to his boss and best friend.
Never really understood the “endorsement” argument some people have about this movie. Can totally understand not enjoying it, but the movie is SO explicit about how empty and sad this whole thing is. Characters are constantly dying suddenly, their millions rendered worthless; no one has kids that like them, no one has family that likes them; hell, Jordan literally does cocaine, punches his wife, and tries to steal—and almost accidentally kills— his kid. If you walk away thinking this is glorifying that vibe instead of showcasing both the allure and deep rot in the pursuit of wealth, I don’t agree.
Matthew McConaughey has a great scene in this as Jordan’s erstwhile boss and mentor, and his morally-dubious but useful advice creates this nice chain of lineage of debauchery and narcissism down through the film. Boys in search of dads doing enough drugs and buying people’s affections in an attempt to feel like the men they admire, who were just as broken and empty as they are. One of the funniest jokes in the movie is that Jordan actually has a dad, played by Rob Reiner, who’s a decent-ish guy, and he still landed on McConaughey as his North Star.
Not the best movie to see with my family, but at least none of them walked out asking why I didn’t go to business school.