The Persistent Nihilism of Martin Scorsese (Review: Wolf of Wall Street)

The Wolf of Wall Street is an entertaining, often hilarious film that seems to perfectly capture the amoral, heartless world of greed and classless hedonism that Wall Street embodies. There are prostitutes, orgies, drug binges galore, people rolling around in money, yachts, expensive cars and beautiful penthouses and mansions. It provides a telling window into how easily people can be taken in by a huckster and how often the old adage a fool and his money are soon parted really is. Leonardo DiCaprio again shows his acting chops, surrounded by an adequate, if not sterling, supporting cast (Jonah Hill is generally funny in a role that takes emoting to a whole new level). DiCaprio plays the real-life Jordan Belfort, who made an unimaginable fortune selling penny stocks to suckers across the income ladder, building a firm from scratch that took on the big boys before finally getting caught by the feds; though he only serves three years in a minimum security prison for the wealthy before heading out on the inspirational speech circuit.

The film is the latest in a growing list of what I call lifestyle porn: films and television that show us the lavish wealth and sex lives of the rich and famous. The genre took off in the 80s with Dynasty, Falcon Crest, Dallas and, of course, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, among many others. The rich were everywhere from sitcoms (even blacks became rich in the 80s, in The Jeffersons and The Cosby Show) to rom-coms to teen romances, where a poor girl invariably ended up with a richer and more popular boy (or vice versa, as in The Breakfast Club). More recently, we can think of The Kardashians, Real Housewives of …, The Apprentice and Entourage. Wolf follows in this tradition, taking the orgasmic bacchanalia to heretofore unrealized levels. There is midget tossing, crack smoking, a long rumination on the inherent benefits of Quaaludes, nudity, insane wealthy, copious cocaine use, brutal violence, money thrown about with abandon and plenty of sex. The film ends up feeling like a combination of one of those screwball comedies from the 80s with plenty of sex, nudity and partying with a more mature, though sardonic character study. Belfort is not only a hedonist but really a bastard without many redeeming qualities beyond his ability to rally the troops, his generosity with his fortune and his good-time-Charlie attitude.

And yet it is hard to watch the film without thinking that Scorsese is celebrating this character, who I believe embodies a more crass, exaggerated version of almost everyone who is successful on Wall Street. Greed is their call to arms, their raison d’etre and their only redeemable quality. Creating wealth is something to admire and Wall Street is tasked with managing risk and funding the future; both essential roles for our economy. But does Belfort play either role? Is he anything but a shyster who takes money from people too dumb to realize they are betting on almost sure losers? I couldn’t help but leave the film thinking we are supposed to respect Belfort as a self-made man that lives the life we all want. And yet, even if this is true, should Scorsese feel any accountability to how this portrayal might be read by the viewers watching the film? Is there any sense that maybe this wealth was built on the back of a lot of suffering – with all those people on the other side of the trades losing their savings, their homes or even worse? One could argue instead that Scorsese is simply doing a very entertaining infomercial for Wall Street and the continued decline of American culture.

The real question is whether Scorsese feels any accountability for his work at all. There has always been a rather troubling celebration of violence in his films that glorifies it as a sign of masculinity and eroticizes it for the viewing public through slow motions and other film tricks. There is the rather negative portrayal of women as sluts to be used for sex and monsters that simply want the money and power of the men they seduce. And there has been a tendency to celebrate money as the god on the altar to whom we all bow and pray. But beyond this is a tendency to celebrate the worst aspects of American capitalism as if crime really does pay in the end. Sure Henry Hill ends up ratting on his friends and living in the suburbs, but he looks back fondly on his days of killing, gambling and drug running. And this is a common trend in Scorsese films, where the protagonist often loses what he had, but rather than learn a lesson from the loss and find some ethical, moral or deeper personal value, they simply look back with nostalgia and regret for the loss. We see this at the end of Casino, Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, Gangs of New York, The Age of Innocence (in a more complicated way) and Raging Bull. Maybe we should read their ultimate failure as the moral of the story, but it often feels as if Scorsese is asking us to feel that nostalgia right along with these protagonists, to forgive their past sins and feel sorry for them having been punished for them in the first place.

Martin Scorsese is among our greatest directors and has made an impressively diverse array of quality, entertaining films or over 40 years. His filmmaking and editing is nonpareil and has moved the industry forward in countless ways. His mixture of cinema verite (in the past) with strong narrative structure and voiceovers has created some of the most compelling films of our time. And his films almost invariably contain a perfect mix of humor, drama and breathtaking action. But it is worth asking what audiences have been sold all these years. A mentally unstable taxi driver kills a bunch of really bad guys and gets away with it. A group of mobsters die, but our hero always makes it to the other side, with his memories intact but his past long gone. A Wall Street crook lives a life of lavish luxury, loses his wife and friends but is back selling at the end, as if little has changed. Underneath it all may be an inkling of ethical responsibility, but really it just feels like nihilism. It could be that the world is meaningless, that there is no justice, that the bad often win and the good suffer, that love is fleeting and unhappiness reigns supreme. But shouldn’t art aspire to something more? Shouldn’t art at least pretend that there is something deeper at the heart of our lives? That they mean something more than pleasure and pain? Scorsese will continue to entertain us with beautiful mis-en-scene, riveting action, compelling plots and characters, first-rate editing and plenty of laughs, gasps and maybe, on occasion, tears, but will he ever truly inspire us? I guess we’ll have to wait and see …