Cinema Wednesdays - Special edition: Leonardo DiCaprio - Loris S. Musumeci
«I'm twenty-two. I'm newly married, and already a greedy little prick.»
Black Monday. Monday, October 19, 1987. It's the crash that leads to crack for Jordan Belfort. He got his broker's license on Wall Street... right on this day. His first day as a broker for L.F. Rothschild, and his last. It wasn't long before Jordan was back at work; at L.F. Rothschild, as a «shitty trainee sub-shit», he had learned to be a financial savage. New job, new setting. From the disgusting luxury of Wall Street, he moved to the shabbiest agency on the corner. They sell penny stocks to the middle class, which is considerably more customers than the millionaires. Jordan knows what he's doing. All his amateur colleagues are amazed.
The broker takes off. He buys himself a Porsche, and decides to go further; always, much further. He picks up a few of his friends, his unhealthy neighbor who quit his job five minutes after meeting him, and sets up his own brokerage firm: Stratton Oakmont. Every employee becomes a bloodthirsty - and money-hungry - beast, and the millions soar. Jordan becomes the Wolf of Wall Street. His company takes the world by storm, both in terms of numbers and morals. A true guru, he motivates his troops with speeches in homage to their only god: money. And to combine business with pleasure, in a spirit of sharing, Jordan regularly organizes open-space parties with his employees: booze, dwarf-throwing, hookers and cocaine. Stratton Oakmont is the dream of debauchery. Until the FBI gets involved.
Excessive
Everything is excessive. Starting with Martin Scorsese's direction. He indulges himself. He violates convention. Playing as he pleases with the narrator's and character's intervention at any given moment, the director allows the story to be entirely subjective. Because it's told by its protagonist, who sells us his existence as he sees fit. But that's not the most excessive part. The slow-motion shots, even the freeze-frames, are shocking. Scorsese, like his heir Tarantino, dares everything. And he does it with such finesse, so fine that it becomes crude, that, by golly, it works. He breaks the codes, and we applaud. But above all: the general public applauds, and not just critics in search of anti-conformism that becomes conformism.
And all that glitter, all that luxury, all that dope - also highlighted by a slow-motion shot of cocaine flying free and light in the air - all that screaming. Leonardo has never screamed so much as in his interpretation of Jordan Belfort. He lets loose completely. His character is excessive, but he adds to it by playing his part to excess. Interacting with Margot Robbie as his bombshell second wife, he overplays both his bestial attraction to her perfect body and his hatred for her, whimpering, dropping to his knees, spreading his arms in theater-like desperation for any hope of spreading her legs - yes, because tired of his excesses, she finally refuses to give herself to him.
The drug effect
In excess, there's the drug effect. Intimately linked to slow-motion photography. Slow motion and its comic effect, its tragic effect, its drugged effect. Drugs take over the whole film. And so, of course, does the performance of its lead actor. Two scenes, one after the other, provoke such enjoyment that you'd think they'd be as effective as two good lines of coke.
The first features a Jordan Belfort paralyzed by you-know-what, He has to get from a phone booth to his car. He can't walk, he can't talk, but an extreme situation forces him to drive home. Without any bad blasphemy, the journey has all the makings of a passion, so much does the character struggle. You want to laugh and cry. And when he arrives by je-ne-sais-quelle-force from je-ne-sais-quel-esprit, He finds his friend in the kitchen, just as drugged up as he is, revealing fraudulent investments through a tapped phone - the extreme situation in question. The friend, under Jordan's furious gaze, flees into the dining room, shoves a piece of ham into his big, dumb mouth and chokes to death. The scene is to die for - but Jordan just about saves his friend - laughing and crying.
The film is in fact a paradox, which places its viewer in this very paradox. The classiest, most luxurious life its protagonists lead is also the filthiest and most luxurious. At the height of humanity, they are inhuman. Ties, jewelry, cars and houses in the pocket, and barbarism too. Jordan's gang are savages, and their tribal chant of «huhu» and chest-thumping follows them throughout the film.
The Wolf of Wall Street is tasty and disgusting. No film has ever been so tasty and so disgusting at the same time. Extreme enjoyment mingles with extreme decadence. It's a dream and a nightmare. Sniffing a rail on a prostitute's crack. What execrable horror, what baseness of spirit; what jouissif phantasm, what carnal height. Jordan Belfort's brilliant DiCaprio makes you want to be just like him. And he recommends only one thing: to never become anything like him. Paradox, when you hold us. You promise us paradises. Artificial. Where the wolf devours the sheep. Where everyone is both wolf and sheep.
Write to the author: loris.musumeci@leregardlibre.com
Photo credit: © Paramount Pictures
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