Art of the Invisible (A Wolf of Wall Street review)

Poster by Daniel Devoy, sourced from designers of tumblr. 

With this money comes problems, and with these problems come solutions.

The Weeknd, "Coming Down" 

Money is just one of things I've never really understood. I get its purpose as a way of getting things, but how it actually works, the mechanisms of the stock market and the exchange rate, that's some arcane science you need to spend six months consulting Old Moore's Almanac before you properly grasp it. All I know is that when I decide I want something to drink, I hand over the little papery thing in exchange because the Bank of England has promised the guy behind the till he's actually getting five English pounds for his trouble. It's a £5 note because someone told us.

Jordan Belfort, at least the smooth charismatic one played by Leonardo DiCaprio, seems to get this, explaining to the audience the inner workings of his schemes before noticing the glazed look and moving on to the juicy details. So too does his mentor Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey), a deranged Wall Street broker going through life in a constant narcotic haze. It's all about faking it, you see, if you want to get ahead. "Nobody knows if a stock is going up, down or fucking sideways, least of all stockbrokers. But we have to pretend that we know." He dispenses valuable advice to his protegé all the while snorting coke and getting Martinis delivered to the table every five minutes and doing some weird chest-beating chant that only makes sense to him and that the young Belfort will later turn into a war cry, all while emphasising that a stockbroker's only goal is to move the client's money to his pocket in such a way that the customer won't even notice.

So monetary exchange becomes an act of magic. Or, more accurately, an addiction, a drug. Hanna outright states that clients end up suckered in because they're hooked on the idea of getting even richer, and Belfort describes it as his favourite for how it makes you feel invincible. After all, with enough money, you can make anything happen. Save endangered animals, keep children and runaways off the street, buy your dear old mum the house of her dreams. Belfort would have you believe that the green stuff makes you a better person.

Not that he's a testament to that ideal. The Wolf of Wall Street's greatest strength is making Jordan Belfort, the author of the memoir the film is based on, an unreliable narrator. His frequent addresses to the audience are taken from Richard III, where the amoral protagonist takes the viewer under their wing and explains their actions, making them complacent in their deeds. A lot of criticism has been thrown at the film for glamorising the various partners and brokers of Stratton Oakmont, and all the bacchanalian shit they got up to. It doesn't help that quite a few places have been throwing "Wolf of Wall Street Parties".

They were probably watching a different film. The hedonism of Stratton Oakmont isn't stylised and aspirational, it's sweaty and writhing and covered in bodily fluids. An early celebration involving a nude marching band and a seemingly infinite supply of strippers quickly descends into a strobe-lit frenzy as women are tossed to the floor, underwear discarded by a bunch of men in braces and ties with their tongues hanging out, all set to the nightmarish blues of Howlin' Wolf. Martin Scorsese has dealt with this "portrayal = endorsement" mindset before in the likes of Goodfellas, and he isn't letting up here.

This is where Belfort as an unreliable narrator comes in. It's easy to accuse the film of sexism, what with every female character who's of legal age being hit on at the very least, and every other woman being part of an endless wallpaper of tits and Brazilian waxes. With the exception of the confident and calculating Naomi (a superb Margot Robbie, playing her as the only woman who can render Belfort a whinging puppy), they're not a major part of the story. But that story is Belfort's, and it's a story he edits on the fly to make himself look good. Scorsese and his Boardwalk Empire partner Terence Winter open with the title character driving a red Ferrari, which then changes to white mid-shot at his insistence. He glosses over the bloody suicide of one of his employees. He thinks his car is pristine after driving it home while whacked out of his skull, only to realise in the morning it looks like he drove it through a hurricane. You can't trust him.

And even if you did, he's not someone you really want to be like. He takes expired Quaaludes by the dozen with his deranged right-hand man Donnie (Jonah Hill) just to get a hit. The result is both men turning into drooling imbeciles who nearly kill themselves and destroy their business in an utterly hilarious scene that approaches Mr Bean levels of slapstick brilliance. Hanna makes the point that to work on Wall Street, you need to snort coke and wank in the office toilet at least twice a day. To be a stockbroker is to become a horny jagoff who literally can't get through the day without furious masturbation and doing enough yayo to fell a bison. Dare to dream, kids!

It's weird how, in 2013, DiCaprio appeared in two films about the dark side of the American Dream: this and Baz Luhrmann's adaptation of The Great Gatsby. While Luhrmann was too swept up in the glamour of the Roaring Twenties to really get to the heart of the source material, Scorsese is under no illusions, and it's fantastic to see an elder statesman of cinema make a film as fearless and powerful as this. Starting from humble beginnings, shedding your old skin and becoming a demon in the process is what the American Dream is now. And it's not like any of us haven't thought of it. We all have lists of What I'll Do When I'm Rich. Men like Belfort are grown in that environment. It's fitting the film ends with him delivering a Get Rich Quick seminar (introduced by the real Jordan Belfort no less) trying to get a bunch of stammering yokels to "sell me this pen". The exact phrase he used to get the original founders of Stratton Oakmont together.

Another wave of wolves pretending to be lions, then. Another congregation in a dark church seeking to become better people. Another hundred Jordan Belforts in the waiting.

I come from a world where even the signposts are fictional. Follow the white rabbit. Second star to the right and straight on 'til morning. And a more recent one, from forty years ago, the fictional direction given by a mysterious man to an eager journalist: follow the money. Economics is an artform. It's the art of the invisible. Money is fictional.

Warren Ellis