Martin Scorsese’s latest film, The Wolf of Wall Street, is a three-hour clown car joke: just when you think the car couldn’t possibly hold anymore clowns, you are happily mistaken. With each ridiculous gag — involving strippers and prostitutes, spinach and cocaine, and shipwrecks and plane crashes — The Wolf of Wall Street achieves a level of comedic insanity heretofore unseen in a film about white-collar criminals. But is the levity appropriate, considering that — thanks to Wall Street — the end may very well be nigh?
The film has received its fair share of criticism for its glorification of sex, drugs, and credit default swaps. An Academy member reportedly screamed at director Martin Scorsese at a screening (I picture it going something like: “How dare you! I’m offended!”). But who can blame them? For example, there is a crack motif present throughout the film. Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) smokes crack, snorts cocaine off a prostitute’s butt crack and has a candle stuck inside his own. Not to mention, the aforementioned relationship with cocaine gives way to Belfort finding true love in the drug Quaalude — which produces an extended scene involving Belfort telling the audience he feels like he has cerebral palsy.
Oddly enough, the inappropriate humour goes hand-in-hand with the mentality of Belfort and his co-conspirators (Jonah Hill, among others). The aforementioned debauchery is an extension of the lack of care they have for others and themselves. That lack of care makes them ideally suited for their line of work. Belfort and Co. go from rags to riches by conning commoners into buying penny stocks. When that works — hilariously well — they move up to the Bourgeoisie with a similar success.
Belfort and friends live the American dream with little regard — but they forget to keep it small. Belfort and his bros get a little arrogant by artificially inflating an initial public offering, whilst skimming off the top. Their hubris and greed attracts the attention of the FBI. But who cares? Even if you’re convicted like Belfort and his merry band were, your prison sentence is a country club purgatory drive-by on the way to a lucrative post-prison consulting career — enriching the future of white-collar criminals for years to come. (My apologies for no spoiler alert, but if you’ve followed the news at all in the last decade, this ending should not come as a surprise.)
By the end of the film, it becomes clear the debauchery has a purpose beyond titillating a future Patrick Bateman from Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho: it’s in lieu of a heavy-handed Michael Moore polemic. It presents the discourse accurately and leaves the audience to pass judgment on its own. Some may see it as a bunch of clown car jokes strewn together that will never end, while others may see that the cycle of white-collar crime seems like it will never end either.
