“Wolf” and “Gatsby”
Dec 28, 2013 17:12:44 GMT -5
Post by shaolin1990 on Dec 28, 2013 17:12:44 GMT -5
A man of humble upbringing decides that he will become a millionaire. For several years, wealth is his only goal, because he desperately wants everything else that comes from being rich. He reinvents himself along the way, transcending his roots, presenting a phony, tony name as his public face to the world. He does not come about his millions entirely legally, and he will one day have to answer for his crimes. But in the high times, he buys a mansion on the Gold Coast of Long Island, where he fills glamorous parties with beautiful women and the men that lust after them. In the film version of his life, he is played by a very tan Leonardo DiCaprio in boat shoes. Pop quiz: “The Wolf of Wall Street” or “The Great Gatsby”?
Even if both films did not open in the same year, starring the same actor, set in the same context of gaudy maximalism, they would still be having an intense conversation with one another (over a Martini and a bloody steak). Both are entries in the great epic of American capitalism, stories of high-flying greed and the power of self-delusion, morality plays about deeply unhappy Trimalchios who drown their insecurities in money and false hopes. But the coincidence (or, rather, brilliant alchemy) of DiCaprio’s appearance in both films just heightens the similarities between the stories, bringing everything into sharp relief.
The tale of two Leos forces the tale of two “Gatsby”s (or three, to bring Fitzgerald’s original novel into it), pitting them against each other, the romantic story versus the depraved one, the tragedy of loving one woman too much versus the tragedy of loving money so much that the soul corrodes. Scorsese’s is a far better film than Baz Luhrmann’s swirly, neon adaptation, but Luhrmann benefited from much better source material, the essence of which couldn’t help but waft off of his hypersaturated, glossy spectacle and still hit the viewer with a cold smack of recognition. No matter where the green light goes, it is always there, and something sad and gleaming shines through. Scorsese’s entire picture sparkles from end to end, dancing so hard and at such a sustained high pitch that it threatens to topple at any moment, and yet there is no lingering light to it, no nagging lesson in Jordan Belfort’s demise. For a person falling from grace to land with a thud, he must have once been graceful. Belfort and Gatsby may share a common criminality on their way to the top, but only one of them makes it look fully disgusting.
In other words, Luhrmann’s film may be the “Gatsby” that this generation deserves (Technicolor, attention-disordered, deafeningly loud, brimming with loose cultural pastiche), but Scorsese’s “Wolf” is the “Gatsby” that the current Wall Street demands—its dark cousin and perverse reflection. There is no deeper romance to “Wolf,” only craven desire. The film has a black heart where a green light should be.
Or, to put it another way, “The Wolf of Wall Street” is like “The Great Gatsby” from Tom Buchanan’s point of view. All the people in it are careless people. You never see Jordan Belfort’s victims, and you never see him truly victimized—it’s all naked bodies and beach houses and slapstick drug binges played for comedy until everything comes crashing down, and not nearly hard enough. The real Belfort got out of white-collar jail on a reduced sentence, found a new life as a motivational speaker, and later sold his memoir rights to the movies for a million dollars. He is a mastermind at self-invention, purely because nothing but excess has driven him; there’s no Daisy on a dock to gun for, just a 747 full of prostitutes and cocaine.
It’s hard to care for the careless, unless someone like Nick Carraway is there to tell us that we should. In “Wolf,” the only person who tells you to invest your time in Belfort is Belfort, directly to the camera, and all too quickly that time starts to feel like a long con, handcuffs binding you to a nauseating joyride with a hedonistic sociopath. Women mean nothing to him besides conquest and sex, empty vessels to flaunt like his elephantine yacht. Daisy Buchanan is herself a fairly empty vessel (and Fitzgerald knew this, admitting that he could never infuse true passion into her affair with Gatsby and that the book suffered for it), but at least we get the sense that she matters to Gatsby, even if what he loves never existed. We admire that he really loved something, rather than lusting after everything. Gatsby’s parties are only a front, a lure for the big fish. For Jordan Belfort, the parties are the end game, the money the alpha and the omega. Money, as Belfort says in one of his bloodthirsty motivational boiler-room speeches, is the path to nirvana: “You can save the fucking spotted owl with money.” Of course, you can also use that money to hire dwarves to throw at a giant dartboard, or to blow cocaine into a call girl’s backside.
In Fitzgerald’s narrative, Gatsby dies for our sins, for the sins of the men and women floating about like moths through his blue gardens who can hit and run in cold blood and live to play polo another day. In Belfort’s, it is Belfort causing the car accidents (and the helicopter accidents, and the yacht accidents), and he walks away without so much as a scratch. Scorsese leaves it up to the audience to be Carraway, to recoil in horror at the debauched behavior of the rich and run away from the theatre with a nauseous feeling and a raging hangover. And, of course, this is where the whole thing runs into trouble. What keeps Fitzgerald’s narrative on a high wire (and makes it one of America’s most enduring myths) is tension; the push-pull repulsion-attraction to wealth that dogged the author throughout his life, the idea that no slice of the American dream comes without someone, somewhere, paying for it. It is important to the story that Gatsby is not Wolfsheim (troubling ethnic stereotypes aside). Whereas Gatsby just wanted to get rich enough to seduce and possess a single woman with his closet of cool linens, his bootlegging mentor was a blatant capitalist gangster who rigged the World Series for fun and profit. Belfort is, in essence, the Wolfsheim of Wall Street.
After a recent screening of “Wolf” in New York, the movie’s screenwriter, Terence Winter (who knows from gangsters), said in a Q. & A. that it was a conscious decision (by Scorsese and also DiCaprio, who optioned Belfort’s story for himself and developed it as a passion project for years—this is his Citizen Cocaine) not to show Belfort’s victims in the film: “We never wanted you to hear the voices on the other end of the line.” As a result, “Wolf” has few casualties—a quick mention of a stockbroker who blows his brains out, a few near-death swipes as a result of hubris and drug-induced haze, a heartless sucker punch to the stomach of Belfort’s distraught second wife—and it is the lack of consequences that have left many critics with a queasy feeling, and the fear that Scorsese will do more harm than good by glorifying a bacchanal put on at the expense of innocent people. When the film screened on Wall Street to a crowd of finance types, there were many cheers and high fives. If any movie is in danger this year of having “bad fans,” it’s this one (watch closely as “Scarface” posters in frat houses are quietly replaced with “Wolf” ones).
But is this Scorsese’s fault, really? Should movies about capitalist thuggery also be responsible for telling us how to live, and how to feel about money? Scorsese has said that “Wolf” is a companion piece to “Goodfellas,” a gangster film at its core, an exercise in slippery morality. We are supposed to find this film excessively ugly. The satire is in its size, its relentless, building vulgarity that cries out for a cold shower. DiCaprio’s performance blares at maximum frequency for the entire film—his highs are all high, and there are no lows (except for when he is literally high on downers, and even then the lows are outrageous). If audiences look upon Belfort’s sybaritic revels and see someone they’d like to be, well, that’s a symptom of who we are now, our own hollow, cynical cores, the byproduct of a recession in which not one of the real criminals at Goldman Sachs was prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
And yet, I hope that when we look back on the cinema of 2013, and particularly on the career of Leonardo DiCaprio, we will see that while “Wolf” might contain the most energy and wild abandon he has ever given a character, his gentle, measured performance as Gatsby (albeit wrapped in a harsh, garish film) was as worthy a contribution to the screen. What Fitzgerald did so very well in the end, and what I miss so much in a film like “Wolf,” was create an undercurrent of hope, the flicker that makes the boats beat on. In “Wolf,” what we get in place of hope is a final shot of Belfort wooing another audience at a motivational seminar (in its own way a form of legal racketeering), teaching wide-eyed hopefuls how to sell anyone, anything, anywhere. He will take their hope and mold it into avarice; that’s the Belfort way. (N.B.: the real Jordan Belfort introduced DiCaprio in the scene—the road from con man to an IMDB credit is the new American dream.) The Nick Carraway of “Wolf,” Kyle Chandler’s solidly moral, “straight-arrow” F.B.I. agent, leaves the film triumphant, having caught the bad guys—but he is still stuck sweating it out on the subway while Belfort plays tennis in his prison whites. It is in the shot of Chandler’s final smirk that the two stories converge. Both “Wolf” and “Gatsby” show that it always feels better to leave the vicious moneyed behind, whether you run away to the Midwest or get the pleasure of putting them behind bars. That even if you are stuck in middle management, riding the F train with the other have-nots of society, you are still worth the whole damn bunch put together.
This is where the convergence ends—and perhaps a story like “Gatsby” could not ever be born again, not after so many Gordon Gekkos and Glengarrys have altered the smell of money. What “Wolf” seems to say is that if a business enterprise stinks, it may as well smell like Drakkar Noir and sex and white powder and the latex of a dominatrix; that if nothing matters but glut, then the gluttony must be extreme, and pungent, and gross. That the future we have to look forward to is not orgiastic but just an orgy.
I don’t know about you, but I liked it better when everything was scented of jasmine under the stars. I hope we deserve that again someday. Until then, we are left to ponder the careless.
www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/12/wolf-of-wall-street-great-gatsby-dicaprio.html
