The Wolves of Hollywood

Image by Courtney Nicholas

This is, more or less, how I imagined the genesis of The Wolf of Wall Street went down:

Marty and Leo wanted to work together again, of course; they have a great track record stretching back to Gangs of New York. When their relationship began it was mutually beneficial, but they were coming from different directions: both were talents, but at the time, Scorsese was the critically-overlooked doyen of crime films and scholar of cinema history, while Leo was the former critical darling whose entire identity was eclipsed by his Beatle-sized, world-dominating fame. Scorsese could get his decades old dream project made and Leo could work with his directing hero. Gangs was not the best of their outings, but at least it brought them together. Their films got better, culminating in the long-due triumph of The Departed. By the time the duo got to Wolf, I’m sure they were as in synch as the ATL Twins as far as how they worked and the kind of material they wanted to explore.

So, while Gangs was not their best outing, it led to The Departed winning several Academy Awards, including Best Director. (An aside: Did the .44 magnum/pussy cameo in Taxi Driver keep him from getting the Oscar until he was 64?) And I’m positive that, with this long-anticipated repairing, they got their money. A superhero-sized budget, because they’re Leo and Marty, and their films do well both financially and critically, so if you’re a dude with some money to burn from stocks or oil or computers or wherever you’ve made your pile, why wouldn’t you want to get a piece of that game? So, they have the dough and they can do anything they damn well please because the money is independent and fuck it, they’re Leo and Marty and who the hell is going to tell them, “no?” This combo shits out Golden Globes like they’re going out of style (maybe they are? Heh heh) and people go to their dark, masculine dramas in the same numbers that they go to see dudes in tights with big Ss and bats on them. If they want to show Leo doing cocaine bullets out of a faceless girl’s ass, fuck it; if they want a ten minute Quaalude sequence (the best part of the film, funny as hell!), fuck it; and if they want their scumbag protagonists to go largely unpunished… FUCK IT, THAT’S LIFE.

Using the book, written by The Wolf himself, Jordan Belfort, Leo and Marty (it’s important to note that both are credited as producers this time around) set out to critique Wall Street and the culture of greed. To give unchecked capitalism a good butt fucking and, like Spring Breakers before it, show how grotesque the American Dream can be when it is misused and abused. And, also similar to those involved in Spring Breakers, they were going to have a damn good time doing it. And by “they,” I mean the characters and the filmmakers and the crew.

I can imagine the pre-production conversations and meetings. They’re both liberal dudes, so they say to themselves, Let's show how ugly things can get in the world of the one-percenters—a scathing depiction of a bunch of douchebags who irresponsibly and unremorsefully took money from hard-working citizens. And then we show what the money was wasted on: drugs, women, and games. Our heroes are our villains in this piece, just like real life. There are no winners, but there are tyrants… Do you really want to be a tyrant? OK, that’s it, but we really need to go far, too far; we are going to show every outrageous thing these guys did.

It is because of the decisions made in this line of thought that this is a truly modern story, one in which we strangely like and hate the characters all at the same time. Again, just like real life. We love them because they are played by Leo and Jonah Hill, who are at their finest and funniest. They seem like fun guys to be around, regardless of the various misdeeds they may be involved in, like DeNiro and Pesci in Raging Bull, Goodfellas, and Casino before them. And, just like those movies, we get the Yin and Yang of Scorsese’s most successful universes—although in this case it is more like the Yang and Yang, with the boys playing only slight but still-distinct variations on the same species of scumbag.

Then there’s reason we like them. The audience can relate to it as a grandiose fantasy that they can just barely touch because, in the end, even though they don’t play by the rules, they win. Audiences like winners, even if he or she is ultimately a bad person, because it gives them an excuse to justify their own behaviors without having to confide in someone about it. It’s one of America’s ultimate cultural traits, hence Werner Herzog’s thoughts about Los Angeles being the epitome of an "American" city largely uninfluenced by European culture or aesthetics. Just look at The Jew of Malta, American Psycho, The Godfather, Scarface, Blood Meridian, Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, or Goodfellas. The tension is caused in these movies, many of which have a long-cresting tension that is relieved within a few, tightly packed scenes. As much as we like the characters in these films, and as much as want to go on the ride with them, the backdrop is too close to home. Scorsese fixates on the villains of real life, and real-life villains have families and step in dog shit and eat pasta and do all these other things that you also do.

When a movie critiques capitalistic greed though the filter of the mob (The Godfather, Goodfellas), it is much easier to go along with the characters because they are not of our real world, or are at least on its extreme fringes. In the case of The Wolf of Wall Street, these villians—these “guys”—are the ones that helped push us into the Great Recession. It has effected just about everyone, or at least someone you know.

Getting back to those initial questions that they had to answer in pre-production, chief among them is how it would end: Should we punish the Wolf for all the money he took from others, and for how outrageously he wasted it? Or should we let him off easy, as he was let off in life, to enlarge our critique to include a system that bails out such scum even when they do so much obvious harm?

They went with the latter option, and it leaves one with a strange sentiment at the end of the film, which I’m sure was intentional. We can look at the bigger picture and see that, of course, Scorsese and DiCaprio are being ironic when they end it the way they do, but it still leaves the sour aftertaste of having a fast one pulled on you, primarily because there is no emotional comeuppance transgressed through the fates of the principal characters. Which is not me saying that I wanted or expected one. I’m just expressing my awareness of the lack of emotion felt for the characters and where they might end up down the road.