Revisiting "The Wolf of Wall Street"

Hi there everybody,

Whilst I'm in the recently-established habit of rewatching a bunch of movies I've seen before, I've tacked on "The Wolf of Wall Street" (2013).

Longtime friends of the blog will remember that I've already written a post about this film.  Now having rewatched it, it's striking that I wrote my first-ever Snap Judgment about it, thereby introducing that post format as a way to write a relatively (but not really all that) brief take on a movie right after watching it.  "Maybe not the most thorough reflection or analysis or anything," I wrote, "but a gut reaction immediately post viewing."

Reconsidering this movie over seven years after I first saw it has led me to also reconsider the gusto with which I rated it a 5, while also wrestling with what new rating to give it.  Looking at the five bullet points with which I highlighted "Wolf of Wall Street" the first time around might help me finally settle on an updated appraisal.  So here goes:

• Remain unintimidated by the runtime.

I still stand behind this.  Yes, almost three hours a long time to watch a movie, but it also moves along at a steady clip and is packed with content, so it hardly feels like a dangerously-close-to-"Titanic" (1997)-length movie.

• Because for example: people move all sorts of ways and it's AMAZING.

While DiCaprio's wedding dancing is still astonishing, the quaalude chase scene didn't land quite so hilariously this time--perhaps because I've lost ever more patience for the unencumbered worship of self-destruction that comprises the majority of the runtime in movies like this.  Sure, there's a brief comeuppance at some point in most films about drug addled scam artists, but those 5-10 minutes of consequences increasingly don't do enough to counterbalance the celebration of substance abuse that they ultimately are.

There's also plenty of other physical action in this film that doesn't sit well--like DiCaprio's Jordan Belfort gut punching his wife Naomi (played by Margot Robbie) before terrifyingly kidnapping their young daughter and ramming his car into a gate with the child in the seat next to him.  Or the just-barely-consensual last time Belfort and Naomi have sex before she ends their marriage.  Or earlier on, when Naomi seems to be gaining the upper hand by setting Lysistrata-esque limits on Belfort's wanton cheating by planting her stiletto firmly on his face, only to be humiliated by the revelation that their in-house body guards can see her from a nanny cam Jordan has planted in their child's room without her knowledge.  Or all of the scenes of myriad sex workers with the dehumanizing, houndish denizens of Belfort's fraudulent firm.  The uncontested misogyny throughout the movie is exhausting.

• Speaking of which: Cinematography WIN!

I mean, sure?  There are certainly several scenes that take on a Where's Waldo? aesthetic because they are so jam-packed with riotous debauch.  As I previously noted, Director Martin Scorsese certainly knows how to use a camera to tell a story.  Those party scenes aside, though, this aspect of the film just didn't hit me the way it did the first time around.

• Jonah Hill!  Matthew McConaughey!  Jon Bernthal!

Yes, but also I can't believe I didn't mention the electric Margot Robbie??  The woman makes a deep Long Island accent sound sexy for Christsakes.

This movie admittedly has a great cast.  Cristin Milioti has such raw yet resigned vulnerability.  Jean Dujardin is so fun as a smug and pretentious Swiss banker!  Kyle Chandler is great as the all-American boy scout-y FBI agent who still knows how to play hardball.

• Yes there is a ton of crazy debauchery, but there's also a healthy and very well-executed bit of pathos.

Yeah.... no.  I just can't get behind that sentiment at all anymore.  

Again, maybe I've just lost patience with these kinds of movies.  Maybe it's the fact that this film is based on real events.  Maybe it's the fact that Scorsese gave the actual Jordan Belfort a freaking cameo in this movie (ew).  But watching "Wolf of Wall Street" again makes it excruciatingly clear that this film doesn't remotely dance on the line between exalting and maligning the wrongdoings and weaknesses of its main character--it takes a cocaine-and-booze-coated flying leap over that line into almost unadulterated glorification.  Fifteen or so minutes of not even that severe consequences can't possibly compete with two hours and forty-five minutes of Belfort bragging about all the exploitive, greedy, destructive nonsense he pulled, especially when that's ostensibly in his own voice.  The wolf of Wall Street is not a man whose name any of us should know, yet Scorsese is ensuring his legacy of unrepentant self-aggrandizing continues.  At this point in my life, it's hard to walk away from a movie like that without feeling kind of icky for dignifying it with my eyeballs.

And yet, to my dismay, I'm still torn.  This movie is a lot--a lot of entertainment and silliness, and a lot of unexamined darkness and ugliness.  I hate to admit that a part of me was still taken in by how much fun a lot of this movie is in its early and middle stages.  It is dazzling, almost stupefying, in its debauchery.  But once Jordan's fist landed in Naomi's stomach, something in me shifted.  From then until the film closes on Chandler's Agent Denham's humble commute home on the subway and Belfort, ever grifting, leading a sales seminar in front of a wrapt, packed audience, it is made clear that this film doesn't have a moral leg to stand on.  

In the cold light of day, years after first watching it and a few weeks after watching it for the second time, this movie is harmful.  It is over-identified with its insatiable antihero, and thereby Scorsese and his audience become just another mark for the con artist at its center.  We just don't need more of these stories--especially when they are about real people who actually did (at least some version of) the awful things portrayed in this film, and now they get to profit from the fruits of their ill-gotten gains via Scorsese's highest-grossing film ever (?!).

And especially when, in addition, that film was financed by corrupt backers who stole billions of dollars from Malaysia???

On that last point, the real question is: Why am I surprised?

At the end of all this consideration, and to reflect my deep ambivalence about this movie, my updated score for "The Wolf of Wall Street" is a 3.

{Heart}