(Reflections on “The Wolf of Wall Street”.)
I am comfortable with complexity,
and I think I’m pretty good at
keeping my moral compass
while recognizing that I am a
product of original sin.
-- President Barack Obama (quoted
in the current New Yorker)
Had it been merely up to me, I would not have gone and seen
the movie, based upon David Denby’s review in The New Yorker, and a
general lack of interest in watching Wall Street sharks on the screen. (In this respect, they are
classed with serial killers, boxers, and baseball players on my personal
cinematic to-avoid list.) The
blandishments of glitz and drugs are among those I happen to be immune to. And, had I been watching it
alone, rather than in the company of a Named U.S. Spouseperson who (a stone Di
Caprio fan) was loving every minute of it, I would have walked out after half
an hour. My appetite for cinematic depravity is
extremely limited; for a time, I
actually used to dial up the minute-long recorded reviews provided
telephonically by the Catholic Church, for some guidance as to what to see. Yet, having stayed, I found much
to enjoy, principally the comedy,
both physical and verbal.
We went, knowing that the film was controversial. My companion had been perturbed
that people had been denouncing the film by saying that the villain doesn’t get
his comeuppance. After we had seen the actual movie, she
wondered which movie the others had seen.
She rather thought that losing your wife, your kids, your house, your
car, your bank balance, and going to jail, does count as a comeuppance of some sort.
However, what makes a movie moral is by no means
that the ultimate verdict of Judgment Day shall be anticipated here in this
life -- as it so manifestly is not, despite the hype and come-ons from certain
motivational evangelists outside the discipline of the Historical Church. It is probably a good thing that
movies aimed at children do mete out such punishments and rewards on-screen, by
way of gently shepherding the development of Just Deserts, to be followed later
by that of Right and Wrong, ultimately to be heightened and quite transformed
in the fullness of Christian understanding. Hollywood habitually panders to the childish
desires of its audience in this regard, as the Historical Church notably does not; but we cannot fault Mr Scorcese for refraining from
regressing to that level.
Moreover, he was closely following the perpetrator’s memoirs in his
narration: the actual scamster was
not sent to prison for life, nor was he struck down by a thunderbolt from the
blue, nor (as the Erinyes would have it)
gobbled up by gerbils, beginning with the genitals;
sorry, it didn’t happen.
~
The critical reactions to this film have been all over the
map.
The Guardian reviewer complains (with what passes in these
times for the equity of Solomon) that, while much pussy is on display, we do
not likewise get to set lots ‘n’ lots ‘n’
lots of cocks, and the one they did show he found (apparently a connoisseur) personally disappointing (duly noted; "More huge cocks for the gentleman in aisle three, please") And he objects, with great Correctitude,
that “With a couple of notable exceptions, the women here are all wives, girlfriends
and sex-workers.” (The complete
absence of nuns,
woman Supreme Court justices, or
female astronaut-cum-brain-surgeon-cum-rocket-scientists
from the trading floor
is indeed inexplicable other than
by imputations of sexism.) Though also (as he does not note): with (as we shall argue) only one notable exception, there are no admirable men. -- Folks: If you want positive role-models for
women, do not go to Wall Street, neither in the movie-house or on lower Manhattan. (Cf. further the
excellent memoir Liar’s Poker in this regard.) And if you want to see your favorite identity-group
glowingly portrayed upon the silver screen -- women, or Hispanics, or plumbers, or meteorologists,
or Pacific Islanders -- then make a movie;
don’t kibbitz the one that other people have made.
Actually, as the Telegraph reviewer pointed out, the movie
does make an extra-textual concession to current sensibilities:
Scorsese includes a sensational scene that echoes the
moment in The Public Enemy where Cagney vengefully pushes half a grapefruit
into the face of his lover. Here, though, it is Belfort’s outraged trophy wife
Naomi, played by Margot Robbie, who hurls a first, second, then third glass of
water in her husband’s face, while he throws a spluttering tantrum.
That is very much in line with the current fashion, in
movies and especially on television, of depicting men as schlumpfs (an
emasculated Cagney) being easily pushed around by superwomen. Maybe that’s an improvement, matter of
taste; but surely we have seen
enough of that.
(There are other scenes of Belfort being masochistically
abused: One by wife as he
crawls on the floor, the whole thing watched on a hidden camera; and one by a somewhat homely dominatrix -- an unpleasant
scene (mercifully brief), but which ends with a very funny line: “Wolfie, Wolfie!” he yelps, as the hot
wax becomes too much; yet she continues
the torture. “Hey, that’s my Safe
Word!” he objects, in the jargon of that sad trade. “Fuck your
safe-word” she retorts, and keeps on abusing him .)
~
And what of that lone male exception to the general
depravity, which I mentioned earlier?
“Down these mean streets, there must walk a man, who is not
himself mean.” (The credo of PI Phillip Marlowe.)
In this movie, in a brief and understated role, that
upright man is Denham, the FBI investigator (based, we are told, upon the real
agent Gregory Coleman, whom we here salute).
The small but crucial role is played with great
patience and self-effacement by Kyle Chandler, whose visage in repose
says more than words.
The virtues of such dogged
self-restraint recall those we praised in our review of
Argo,
concerning the role taken up by
actor/director Ben Affleck.
Among the most poignant and elegiac moments in movies, come
towards the very end of the weary road traveled, and occur without words. Such is the silent and solitary walk
beneath the falling leaves, that culminates “The Third Man”; such, the blowing leaves across the
lawn, as a single shot rings out in the distance, in the second
“Godfather”; and such, here, the
agent’s lonely ride on the New York subway, after another wearying day at work,
as he silently beholds the care-worn faces of the strangers around him, whom he
is sworn to protect.
Roger Ebert:
Belfort chides the prosecutor
Denham for living what Henry Hill would have called the goody-two-shoes life,
and in a scene near the end, as Denham rides the subway home, we can see that the taunt stuck in his craw.
(He’s not a prosecutor, he’s an FBI investigator, but
anyway.)
David Thomson agrees:
When he tells the FBI man who has been tracking him for years
that on his lowly government salary the agent will still be riding home on a
hot, slow subway watching the lost faces he’s supposed to be protecting, this
could be the bravado of a crook on the run. But then the movie depicts that
glum moment and Mr. FBI looks like a stooge who realizes every Belfort boast
was gold.
That might well be the director’s intention; I don’t know, I saw it through my own
lenses, with a vision entirely different, tutored and clarified is it has been by the example of Father Brown. As Denham’s eyes beheld the tired
and decent subway-riders at the end of another workday, to me it felt like a
return to sanity. Here were the
people that Belfort had fleeced:
and -- thanks to Denham’s tireless efforts -- Belfort (as we are
reminded in the next shot, surely a hint at what was in Denham’s mind as well
at that moment) was heading off
for a stretch in the slammer.
The perspective I have in mind is difficult to convey in a few lines; but I shall try, simply by way of
pointing to a short work which, all in itself, is worth a dozen of the films of
Mr. Scorcese: G.K. Chesterton’s
“The Queer Feet”, featuring the portly bespectacled detective-priest, Father
Brown. In this tale, Brown
is obliged by circumstances to undo a swindle being perpetrated upon “The
Twelve True Fishermen” (the name is an irony), these being a group as select
and wealthy as the money-men of Wall Street:
Since it is immeasurably unlikely
that you will ever rise high enough in the social world to find “The Twelve True Fishermen”, or
that you will ever sink low enough among slums and criminals to find Father
Brown, I fear you will never hear the story at all unless you hear it from me.
The key to solving the mystery, which Father Brown, even
more immured than Nero Wolfe, solves purely by listening to footsteps, from
within the confines of a cloakroom, lies in something just a bit off about the rhythm, just as, in the classic story “The Wrong Shape”, it turns
upon a subtle corruption of shape.
Father Brown recovers the silver loot and returns it to its
(improper) owners, while recovering (how far more precious a treasure) the
thief to Grace. (Though, in a
merely physical sense, he lets him go.)
“Did you catch this man?” asked the
colonel, frowning.
Father Brown looked him full in his frowning face. “Yes,” he said, “I caught him,
with an unseen hook and an
invisible line which is long
enough to let him wander to the ends of the world, and still to bring him back
with a twitch upon the thread.”
Laus deo!
And then, his work there done (though never understood or
properly appreciated), Father
Brown must end his workday.
And saying “Good evening,” he pushed upon the heavy doors of that
palace of pleasures. The golden
gates closed behind him, and he went at a brisk walk through the damp, dark
streets, in search of a penny
omnibus.
~
Thus far have faith and philosophy had their say. What of the actual human
viewer? Consider the
response of my companion, who watched the whole thing enthralled.
At one point, as the Bureau’s investigation inexorably
progressed, she remarked (the first thing she had said in the course of the
movie): “It’s too bad he’s doing things that are illegal.”
I turned and stared.
“Um, honey, even apart from that:
he is not a good man….”
Her attitude (which I report with reticence) flowed by no
means from generalized moral obtuseness, but from a specific scotoma supplied from
the collective unconscious, from the psychic substrate from which we grow:
She sees in Di Caprio the visual image
of her former suitor and her current son.
(This insight was originally supplied to me by someone who
knows us both.)
Do not scoff at this;
it is because of such instincts that
mothers put up with us at all.
~
A.O. Scott begins and ends his review with a question; respectively,
Does it offer a sustained and
compelling diagnosis of the terminal pathology that afflicts us, or is it an
especially florid symptom of the disease?
and
Does “The Wolf of Wall Street”
condemn or celebrate?
Answer (respectively):
“Neither”; and “Both”.
It’s not important to “get this movie right”; it is not an
important movie. One good
friend hated it; my wife loved
it; de gustibus. The bacchanalia quickly
fades; eternal things remain.
