The Wolf of Wall Street

From The New Republic review:

"At three hours, The Wolf is open to charges of self-indulgence. The narrative line drifts and wallows and clutches at voice-over to stay afloat. Still, if you love the film, you will wish it were longer, for there is a riffing ease here, a swell air of deserved chaos, and a brazen awareness that the American system is corrupt not because bad people seek to exploit it, or because there is some evil in the hearts of men, but because American opportunism requires corruption and nerve. The inevitable 
conclusion is that there is no such thing as corruption. There is just the exhilaration of screwing everyone—and so, for the first time, the gang in a Scorsese film is delivered with more jubilation than dread. GoodFellas knew it was subversive, and took coy pleasure in that. This is unflawed delight, a work of exultant nihilism. At last Scorsese has abandoned the priesthood."

Open to charges of self-indulgence?! It isn't boring--it just goes on and on--drugs and women and more drugs and more women. When everything is a big party, it's hard to pick out the actual narrative.

"The inevitable conclusion is that there is no such thing as corruption." Wow--really? The film just doesn't come down with a moralistic judgment; however, there's no backing away from relying on the viewer's natural nausea and recoiling from such actions. Nothing in the entire film was remotely enticing to me. Nothing was desirable or enviable in any way. Now, if you wanted to see Leonardo DiCaprio's character, Jordan Belfort, have a moment in which he realizes his own depravity, then you're going to be disappointed. But just because a smarmy character is only obsessed with money and influence and control, doesn't really signal to me that the film is without judgment: Belfort loses his wife (actually 2) and children--he endangers his daughter's life by trying to drive away with her while high. He's too far gone to see these as bad things, but it isn't hard for the viewer to.

I can't believe that the film came out on Christmas. I don't really know what else to say about that, except that I don't like this review:

"Seeing the film on Christmas day was a tonic, not just dispelling bogus holiday atmospherics, but as a lesson in blithe amorality."

The reviewer argues that corruption is not corruption; it's just the American way. I disagree: the America I know is more modest, more puritanical, more hard-working than the Wall Street that the film presents. The America I know is the postmen that Jordan Belfort was scamming, not the scammers (granted--the postmen fell for the scams in a desire to make easy money, but there's still a big difference).

Disability actually comes up quite a bit in a film about Wall Street scammers. The film begins with a frat-party-like atmosphere at Belfort's office where people in the office are competing by throwing dwarfs head-first at a target. Later, Belfort asks his partner about marrying his cousin and what he would do if his children were born disabled (his partner jokes that he would drive them into a rural area and "set them free" by pushing them out of the car; he then amends himself--he'd send them to an institution). After a particularly potent drug experience, Belfort describes himself as feeling like he has cerebral palsy. He is unable to communicate and rolls himself down the steps to his car. Finally, and most strikingly, The Wolf of Wall Street quotes from Ted Browning's 1932 film, Freaks. Belfort and his colleagues chant the "One of us! One of us!" mantra that, in Freaks, is chanted by the carnival "freaks."

One reviewer, who paid better attention than I did, writes:

In addition to the happy hookers that Belfort and his brokers buy and use for part of the entertainment at his weekly parties -- the dwarves who rent themselves out for throwing at huge velcro dart boards, human bowling, and the like -- are referred to as "it" and compared to animals. In the boardroom over negotiations over the dwarf rental, it's declared that you "never look one in the eyes," and that "we need a tranquilizer gun ready" in case the dwarves charge like wild animals on the Serengeti. And then there comes the completely unexpected "one of us, one of us, gooba gabba, gooba gabba, one of us" chant from Todd Brown's 1932 masterpiece, Freaks, complete with pounding and chanting on the boardroom table. Amazing.

I don't even remotely know what to do with these references to disability. It seems like the disabled are, like women and anyone they can possibly scam, just instruments that they can use.