The violence of Goodfellas also implies a kind of personal integrity in the otherwise amoral Hill he's the only one shocked by Spider's murder.
#Wolf of wall street soundtrack movie#
Less charitably, a commentator under Richard Brody's celebration of the movie drubbed the film as "Goodfellas without the intensity" and indeed, the constant threat of brutality lends that earlier film a certain weight lacking in Wolf of Wall Street's more abstract stakes (as many have noted, the victims of his stock scams are rarely shown or heard). In this singleminded hunger for profit and gleeful love of the game, Belfort most resembles Henry Hill and indeed, numerous friends and co-workers have told me the film is "like Goodfellas but with sex and drugs instead of violence." That may be a key difference (and of course, Goodfellas also has plenty of sex and particularly drugs, albeit not quite on this scale). A moral test of sorts comes near the conclusion when (brief spoiler alert) he tries not to inform on a friend but this paradoxically ethical gesture is relatively underplayed and we're not given much sense of it as a crucial turning point for Belfort (and indeed, it pans out that it's not). But as soon as he wanders into a hilariously drab penny-stock boiler room (depicted with an almost loving sense of geographical specificity which evaporates the wealthier Belfort becomes) and proceeds to make $2,000 off a single phone call (and a single low-rent sucker), he's revealed as - and remains - a charismatic sociopath.
Only briefly, as he struggles through an early job on the Street and later reads job listings with forced stoicism, do we see Belfort as a normal human being, haunted by the spectre of failure and burdened by some sense of responsibility.
Ultimately it is that lack, rather than the film's playful tone-shifting or abandonment of historical specificity, which defines this as the most postmodern of Scorsese's films. Becoming a titan of Wall Street may seem more ambitious than, say, getting on a talk show or shooting up a whorehouse, but in the film's own dramatic terms it doesn't seem to be, because this challenge never truly seems to engage or threaten Belfort's soul in fact, we suspect he doesn't have a soul to lose. Where he differs from those other characters is in the seeming superficiality of his drive and his goals.
Belfort certainly fits that trend, and the self-destruction and social alienation of his quest (albeit preceded by unusual enrichment and camaraderie) dovetail with the director's fascination with martyrs to a self-centered cause. Jesus Christ and Travis Bickle, Newland Archer and Jake LaMotta, Howard Hughes and Rupert Pupkin are all men on a mission. Scorsese's antiheroes have often been focused and driven in their singular vision, hungry for some form of transcendence while casting aside anything - or anyone - that interferes. Which may, of course, be the point since this description so aptly mirrors Jordan Belfort's personality. On first viewing, it seemed a film of many accomplishments but little depth. I liked The Wolf of Wall Street, particularly certain sequences worthy of Scorsese's legendary oeuvre, but I didn't love it. Yet here this makes for an enjoyable but occasionally alienating and mystifying viewing experience. That's not necessarily a terrible thing: spry, termitic filmmaking is often more successful than the heavy-handed elephantine approach. Most of all, I can't really place the purpose of the movie. Technological and fashion changes are often present as details but aren't foregrounded as in Goodfellas also unlike that film the soundtrack is an alternating mashup of hip-hop, rumba, and whatever Scorsese feels like playing in a particular moment, rather than a reflection of character and/or cultural development. More intriguingly, the film seems to float above history: while it begins identifiably in the late eighties (Jordan Belfort's first day as a licensed broker is even alleged to be Black Monday) and occasionally touches down on specific cultural phenomena (like Steve Madden's bobble-headed girl ad campaign) at no point does the film really riff on a zeitgeist. Hard to place in several ways - most obviously, the film's tone embraces straightforward rise-and-fall dramatics, social satire, and broad comedy, while the slipperiness of its moral outlook, both conventionally disapproving and hedonistically exuberant, has been elsewhere duly noted. It's hard to place Martin Scorsese's mercurial The Wolf of Wall Street, a (mostly?) true tale of the corrupt, greedy, and eventually imprisoned financier Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio).
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