About one hour into The Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) is violently confronted by his first wife, Teresa Petrillo (Cristin Milioti), for various blatant infidelities. The camera and the viewer are focused on the two battling spouses, the scene shot in classic shot-reverse shot pattern as Belfort and Petrillo lay into one another. After the argument is over, the camera angle shifts to a landscaped establishing shot from medium distance away, framing Petrillo and Belfort in the mirrored gold façade of Trump Tower. The film was released in 2013, so Scorsese selected Trump and his overwhelming tackiness before he became a prominent, cartoonish political figure.
This brief, few-seconds-long scene in the midst of a three-hour film encapsulates so much about The Wolf of Wall Street as a quintessential New York/American fable of greed, tackiness, the vacuous, insecure masculinity of the man-children who somehow run everything (Elon’s “titter” stunt as the most current and stupidest possible example); and the inherent hollowness of a capitalism in which the new tycoons produce nothing but blips on digital screens. Belfort, as the film makes plain, is the personification of insipid: he has all the money anyone could ever want and all he wants to do with it is take drugs and thoroughly misbehave on the glamorous train-wreck level that sells magazines and goes viral. He ripped off thousands and thousands of people all for the sake of buying a huge floating phallus, which he then lost to the bottom of the sea in a petulant tantrum. That Scorsese likens him to the criminal 45th President of the United States, who famously has no good taste in anything, and his propensity for building dick-shaped buildings, is just the sort of bravura visual storytelling a cinephile would expect from a master director.
When it was released, The Wolf of Wall Street generated a great deal of controversy for supposedly glorifying the woman-abusing, drug-addicted lifestyle of Belfort and his moronic cronies. Yet to depict is not to condone; take the hilarious defining scene where Belfort is wrestling Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill) while both are so stoned on Quaaludes, they can neither walk nor talk, the former strangled by a phone cord and the latter nearly choking to death on some deli ham. Nobody watches this thinking that’s the way to live. At no point does The Wolf of Wall Street make being a dickhead, cokehead stock broker look remotely fun. Belfort, while occasionally humanized or lionized for his few positive qualities (loyalty to his friends, for example), is never the sort of ambiguous anti-hero that audiences hate to pull for, such as Don Draper or Saul Goodman. He sucks, from the first scene to the last, consumed by his insatiable lust for a life of ostentatious material consumption, where beautiful women are objectified as just one piece of exquisitely-marketed consumer goods.
All the unfounded negative attention the film garnered among nitwits, prudes and idiots left little space for viewers to champion The Wolf of Wall Street as perhaps Scorsese’s best film, but it stands near or at the top of his storied filmography. Money-laundering insider traders are not as sexy as organized gangsters and mafiosos, but it is people like Belfort who make this country so hard to reside in; invisible wage theft is WAY more prevalent than loud criminal theft, after all. Scorsese pretends that Belfort is a serious person with serious ideas and this act of imagination lets the filmmaker lampoon Belfort and show just how vapid he is. But it also allows Scorsese to show that most people’s reaction to people like Belfort was a shrug or a knowing grin; most of what he did was both legal and acceptable to mainstream society. He was taking care of his family, securing generational wealth and creating jobs. It may have been unsavory, but those without the stomach for unsavory work will never strike it rich. The conclusion, where Belfort barely goes to prison and then easily finds a way to make money upon leaving captivity, when contrasted with the millions languishing behind bars or struggling to pay their bills after committing far less damaging crimes, only cements The Wolf of Wall Street as a tale as American as apple pie. Give Belfort a Big Mac and put Tucker Carlson on his television and he would be indistinguishable from a certain former president.
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