The Wolf of Wall Street

THE WOLF OF WALL STREET (Martin Scorsese, 2013)

If THE GREAT GATSBY’s Nick Carraway arrived on Wall Street in the late 1980s and decided that the corruption and decadence was pretty awesome, he’d look something like Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) in THE WOLF OF WALL STREET.  Jordan starts out with notions of doing right by the clients while making money for his firm and himself, but his first day on the job he’s quickly disabused of such thinking.  As his boss Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey) makes clear, they’re playing with other people’s money.  The point is to keep the investors’ cash in the game so they can keep getting their share via commission.

Jordan finds himself out of a job after the October 1987 stock market crash, but his fortunes take a marked upturn when he begins pitching penny stocks in a strip mall boiler room in the suburbs.  He’s a gifted salesman who knows exactly what to say to convince blue collar types to risk their hard-earned cash on companies unlikely to produce the returns he implies are possible.  The commission percentages are much higher on the garbage he’s selling than on the blue chip stocks, so it isn’t long before Jordan is earning fat checks and striking out on his own.

Jordan’s brilliant idea is to open his own brokerage house that lures wealthy investors with familiar investment options and then pushes a bunch of the crap stocks on them.  Jordan perfects the script that he teaches to his right hand man Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill) and some old friends so they can land well-heeled clients.  The plan works like a charm.  Jordan rebrands the firm as the more legitimate-sounding Stratton Oakmont and moves them out of a former auto body shop on Long Island to offices in New York City’s financial district.    

For three hours director Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Terence Winter present enough bad behavior and language to make a proverbial sailor blush, yet by and large the illegal business practices, heavy drug use, and degradation of women is rewarded and mostly consequence-free.  Jordan and crew achieve their warped vision of the American dream because on some level society deems this acceptable, even if the ugly truths may be hidden from view.  Jordan lives the high life in the land of get mine rather than the land of opportunity, and Scorsese makes it look like a blast to be able to be bombed out of your mind on cocaine and quaaludes and enjoy all that money can buy, whether it’s purchasing a mansion, yacht, helicopter, and sports car or trading up from mousy wife Teresa (Cristin Milioti) to lingerie-designing model Naomi (Margot Robbie).

THE WOLF OF WALL STREET has faced some criticism for making Jordan’s excessive and criminal lifestyle seem too attractive without condemning it, especially because this is based on a true story, but that’s precisely the point.  Jordan has what a lot of people want.  He’s just one of the few able to get it by exploiting get rich quick dreams.  It goes without saying that Jordan and associates are horrible people, but they’re the manifestation of a culture that confuses the pursuit of wealth with the pursuit of happiness.

Jordan and his employees are nothing more than con men operating under a more respectable banner. DiCaprio shines as a huckster whose disdain for his marks ignores the fact that he too has bought into the slick talk he uses to rip them off.  When Jordan gives savage inspirational speeches to his work force, DiCaprio comes off like a bright-eyed cult leader.  He’s very persuasive, yet his monologues seem designed to convince himself of the worthiness of his choices as much as they are to fire up the cold callers doing his bidding.  This puffery emerges in Jordan’s unreliable narration.  For instance, an amount of cash he claims was stolen from his Trump Tower apartment increases as he tells the story.  When Jordan is wrong or inconsistent with the details, it’s in service of building his own legend, which makes him more self-assured and more of an authority to those turning to him for guidance.

Jordan uses words to seduce, and DiCaprio relishes every one in his performance, whether he’s barking out motivational speeches or flirting with bribing an FBI agent.  DiCaprio hints at a wink behind everything Jordan says.  It’s as if he’s asking the rhetorical question “ain’t I a stinker” while beaming with pride at his ignoble accomplishments and actions.  DiCaprio also attacks the physical comedy with zest, particularly when Jordan crawls down a country club’s front steps to his car while incapacitated on powerful sedatives and engages in a slow motion chase of Donnie when he gets home.

Although THE WOLF OF WALL STREET places the spotlight on an unflattering portrait of individual and collective aspirations, Winter’s screenplay spots a lot of humor in the squalor and buffoonery.  All that’s missing is a laugh track to these men behaving badly.  The question is whether all that cackling is because of the idea that these slimeballs are to be envied and emulated or that there are so many suckers waiting to be bled dry.

Grade: A

Django Unchained

DJANGO UNCHAINED (Quentin Tarantino, 2012)

Quentin Tarantino loves mixing low and high art in his films, but until DJANGO UNCHAINED he never combined disparate ingredients to make a cocktail of the Molotov variety.  Through exploitation film violence and articulate dialogue--fancypants talk, as the film’s villains might say--the writer-director creates a lurid, funny, and smart entertainment that sneaks in potent commentary on racism in America and the movies. DJANGO UNCHAINED can be enjoyed purely for its numerous surface pleasures--Robert Richardson’s widescreen cinematography, the screenplay structure mirroring Germanic legend, and the clever, unconventional soundtrack cues--but careful study reveals it also to be a work expressing historical and contemporary fury.  

The film opens in 1858, roughly two years before the start of the Civil War, with German bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) enlisting the help of slave Django (Jamie Foxx) in his pursuit of three brothers with nice prices on their heads.  Django is glad to cooperate, as the wanted men heaped abuse on him and Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), the wife he’s recently been separated from.  Schultz promises to pay Django and give him his freedom once they’ve found and killed the Brittle brothers, but rather than parting ways, they become partners in acquiring Broomhilda’s independence.

They learn that she was sold to Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), the Francophile owner of a notorious Mississippi plantation.  To make Candie’s acquaintance Schultz pretends to be interested in getting into the mandingo fight game, in which slaves spar to the death.  Django will pose as Schultz’s expert, a black slaver.  While their ruse might fool Candie, his head house slave Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson) is more suspicious of their motives.

Playing a role is one of the recurring themes in DJANGO UNCHAINED, and it’s a sly way for Tarantino to discuss how African-Americans are often required to adapt to pass in what gets defined as mainstream culture.  Django must swallow his pride and put forth a different appearance to achieve what he desires.  In that manner he’s no different than Stephen, an Uncle Tom whose demeanor shifts enormously when addressing blacks or whites and within a group or in private.  (Even Schultz, who does not bear the burden of being a racial outsider but is a foreigner, must adopt an exaggerated appearance of propriety and intellect to be perceived as less threatening.)  Not breaking character is literally a matter of life and death.     

Tarantino also dissects politeness as a defensive weapon, with the artful in-joke that Waltz’s Dr. King is expertly practiced in it, and the dropping of formal civility as an offensive action.  After all, DJANGO UNCHAINED turns on the refusal to shake hands. Passive resistance and dampened emotions can’t help but be unleashed in a more explosive form after so long of a struggle to keep them in check.  It’s a neat trick that Tarantino evokes the volatility of the 1960s civil rights campaign and the Civil War battlefield with a bloody shootout inside a plantation house.     

Tarantino’s films have a complicated relationship with violence.  He enjoys bloody revenge fulfilled on screen yet can be repulsed by having the basest of impulses satisfied.  DJANGO UNCHAINED is no different.  Tarantino’s expert use of sound and suggestion convey the horrific treatment of slaves without lingering over it.  (His reputation for depicting violent acts is greater than what’s actually visible.)  The violence exacted upon the villains, almost all white, is more explicit visually, but in featuring blood geysers taken from the trashy movies that inspire him, it’s cartoonish too.  Somehow he finds a way to be responsible with on-screen violence and wallow in its disreputable appeal.

Django must hold his passion in reserve for much of the film, which makes it all the easier to overlook Foxx’s subdued performance.  The character mustn’t betray his feelings, so the power of Foxx’s work is found in his eyes and posture and how he withholds the anger burning inside him.  If ever an actor was born to deliver Tarantino’s words, it’s Waltz.  He savors the ornate sentences and brings lightness to the heavy narrative lifting he’s called upon to execute.  Waltz also displays crack comic timing that he shows off when he walks Django through his method of doing business.  DiCaprio relishes playing the self-regarding creep and does a dazzling flip from southern-fried hospitality to menace.  Jackson gets the difficult task of acting the part of a classic Hollywood stereotype, but he fleshes out his despicable character as Django’s opposite. A white man gave Stephen the opportunity to have some latitude too and he took it. Tarantino supports the fantastic performances by letting major conversation-driven scenes play out in wide shots and thus allows observing the dynamics between multiple characters at once.

DJANGO UNCHAINED presents Tarantino as a film critic and cultural analyst.  He’s a highly gifted filmmaker whose work is more thoughtful and nuanced than the statements he sometimes offers while playing the manic provocateur part in publicity appearances. This bloody, hilarious, shocking, and righteously angry film is the kind of great art and great trash he aspires to make.

Grade: A

J. Edgar

J. EDGAR (Clint Eastwood, 2011)

In the biographical picture J. EDGAR director Clint Eastwood and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black track the career of the longtime Federal Bureau of Investigation director.  Leonardo DiCaprio stars as J. Edgar Hoover, a morally certain man who improved and expanded the once-Bureau of Investigation’s ability to fight crime, although not without amassing his share of detractors.  

Hoover rose to the top in 1924, saw the agency become federal in 1935, and stayed until his 1972 death.  The legality of his methods, not to mention his secret files, made him powerful and controversial.

Framed by the head G-Man dictating his memoir, J. EDGAR has a lot of territory to cover and does so swiftly.  The Palmer raids, the Lindbergh baby abduction, and the relentless pursuit of gangsters and political subversives are tied together in a fleet, often exhilarating yarn of a righteous man who will not rest until he has stamped out all criminal and radical elements.  Hoover is clear and authoritative when recounting his accomplishments, yet J. EDGAR questions how reliable of a narrator he is and at what cost such unyielding professional striving did to the individual and the nation.

The successful but petty and vindictive man at the center of J. EDGAR is as much a mystery as what he kept in his confidential files.  Eastwood and Black give Hoover credit where it’s due, especially in the admiration for his organizational rigor and faith in scientific evidence as a valuable tool.  The speculative private life they give him, in which he and associate director Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer) share a closeted and presumably unconsummated relationship, goes a long way in humanizing a man who would ride roughshod over the livelihoods of his subordinates and perceived enemies.

DiCaprio does marvelous work portraying a man who, frankly, seems like he would have been unpleasant company, even to those long loyal to him.  Hoover’s magnetism derives from his intellect, certainty, power, and sense for myth-making, and DiCaprio bears that out with a performance of a man who himself may be constantly performing as though he has nothing to hide.  Hammer’s Tolson seems in awe of and puzzled by his friend and co-worker.  Hoover’s longtime secretary Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts) demonstrates great respect and empathy even as she appears not to understand this man she’s know for decades.  Something must have earned their dedication.  That mystery is what encourages looking even closer at this blank slate of a person.

Grade: B