By Paul Byrnes
The Wolf of Wall Street
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Rated R, 179 minutes
Pssst, wanna see a dirty movie? This one has cocaine snorted from a prostitute's privates and a lighted candle inserted in Leonardo DiCaprio's bottom. Thank heaven it wasn't the other way round.
Martin Scorsese, at 71, still has the power to shock, but The Wolf of Wall Street is hardly about titillation. There have been reports of the depravity upsetting some viewers. A few critics have charged the film with glorifying excesses of drugs, sex and money. Surely not?
Could it be true that an American movie would glamourise such tawdry aspects of human weakness? The very thought. Let us all put some fresh ''po'' on the face and discuss depravity. Frankly, it's hard to imagine any cinema without excess. Scorsese's whole career would never have started without the freedom to go too far that followed the loosening of American censorship in the 1960s.
Irredeemable: Leonardo DiCaprio and Margot Robbie live large as Jordan Belfort and his wife.
Almost every film he has made has taken us deeper into the heart of American darkness: Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, Raging Bull, Casino, The Departed. The Wolf of Wall Street just does it with better suits. It's a gangster movie without guns, but more money than the mafia could count.
Of course it glamourises the life of Jordan Belfort, the slimy stockbroker who defrauded his clients of $200 million before he went to jail (albeit briefly). As played superbly by Leonardo DiCaprio, Belfort accumulates money at a rate, and with an ease, that will have thousands of youngsters dreaming of a life in the stock market. No matter that Scorsese also shows his downfall, his grubby betrayal of his friends and his alienation from wife and children. The kid who just wants to make money will remember the scene of him having sex with his sexy blonde wife - played by the fit Australian actress Margot Robbie - on a pile of money. Hmmm.
And why not? This all happened and if we are to understand how he got away with it, we need to see how he did it and what kind of man he is, or was. A movie is not a church meeting, after all, even if a story is a moral document. The film has some dramatic problems, but Scorsese is not responsible for how his film is misinterpreted. Belfort has said in interviews that two of his great heroes were Gordon Gecko from Oliver Stone's film Wall Street, and Edward Lewis, the character played by Richard Gere in Pretty Woman. Greed is good, but sex is better, in other words. Such are the dangers of relying on movies for moral lessons.
The bigger problem for Scorsese is not the excess, but the ennui. The film is hilarious, probably funnier than anything he has done, a rollercoaster ride in which Belfort goes from running a suburban ''pump and dump'' operation in Queens - talking up penny stocks to nickel-and-dime clients, then selling his own stock before the price falls - to being the head of Stratton Oakmont, a seemingly legitimate firm with 1000 brokers trading in billions. The company practises the same deceptions on a much bigger scale and in an atmosphere that's more cult than business. DiCaprio preaches rapine rather than salvation, and the benefits are immediate. He brings in teams of hookers and tankers of champagne for his acolytes. They have sex under the desks. It's the Playboy mansion meets a tent-show revival. Hallelujah and pass the percentages.
The problem is where to take this, in a dramatic sense. The script by Terence Winter (The Sopranos, Boardwalk Empire), based on Belfort's two books, keeps building the excesses, looking for a way to make sense of it all. One of the most memorable scenes has DiCaprio and Jonah Hill, as Donnie Azoff, his right-hand man, flopping about on the floor of Belfort's mansion, drooling and grunting, unable to talk or control their legs. They have ingested so many drugs in the pursuit of happiness that they have become pitiful, gaping like fish on a dock.
It is clear that we are meant to see Belfort's shyster operation as a metaphor for the other Wall Street, the ''respectable'' ones who looked down on him as they ruined the world's major economies five years ago. It is also a much wider metaphor, as always with Scorsese. Most of his films are both autobiographical and geographical. I am a sinner, he tells us; I was that man who took too many drugs in the 1970s; I am America. That's why his films are moral but not preachy, more like self-criticisms with a deep understanding of human weakness.
In the end, fun as it is, The Wolf of Wall Street lacks a sense of transcendence and resolution. Belfort was a scumbag and he remains unredeemed at the end, a schmuck with the gift of the gab. His story is neither cathartic nor tragic, because there is no greatness in him. Only greed.
As much as I enjoyed it, I felt like I needed a shower afterwards.
The bigger problem for Scorsese is not the excess, but the ennui.
Twitter: @ptbyrnes